A while ago, we took a look at the Bolt 3 from Digital Storm, a boutique-built
gaming PC that caught the eyes of a lot of enthusiasts for its striking good
looks. But as attractive as it was, we know that many of you swear by building
your own rigs exclusively, like I do.
So, today we're taking a look at the slightly bigger brother to the case from
the Bolt 3, the Leon Lee PC06S, which
supports up to microATX instead of just miniITX. It's available on its own, so
you can fill it with whatever goodies you like without paying a premium to
have it pre-built. So, what's it like to assemble a PC inside of it? Let's dive
right
in. GFuel is the sugar-free alternative energy beverage to maintain focus and
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out the new Kiwi strawberry flavor at the link below. Leon Lee has been famous
for making aluminum PC cases with interesting looks. Anyone remember the
train case? Yeah, that's kind of what they're known for. The PC06s is no
exception. Not only do you get a completely aluminum body, but a side
panel made of actual tempered glass. Beautiful. No plastic or acrylic, none
of that stuff. This makes your components look downright dramatic,
especially if you throw some nice lighting into your case. If you think
its beauty is a thing to behold, you can display your work of art on the wall.
The PCO 6S is wall mountable. So, that's pretty cool. But if you do just want it
to be on your freaking desk, it can be oriented in either horizontal or
vertical positions on your desk with the use of the stand if you want it to be in
the vertical position. Let's go ahead and start our tour of the case's
exterior. On the front, you have the power switch, but interestingly, no
reset button. Moving on, you have headphone and microphone jacks and four
USB 3.0 ports, which is pretty sick. You
will need a pair of USB 3.0 headers on your motherboard to get all of these
ports running at full speed. But because many motherboards only have a single USB
3.0 header, they have included a USB 2.0
adapter. You just won't get full speed from that. You also get a slim optical
drive if you're into that sort of thing and a mesh grill that shows off your
power supply of all things. More on that later. Moving to the top, there's more
venting with a filter for the three pre-installed 120 mm sleeve bearing
fans. You can also mount a radiator up here as well for additional cooling.
Another note is that the entire top of the case is actually removable and
unscrews and comes off, which you'll need to do when building the computer.
The left side panel is just that large piece of tempered glass that shows off
your internals. Since the case is quite thin, you won't be able to fit a tower
style cooler in here, but some lower profile coolers will fit in just fine
with the case's 85 mm of vertical tolerance. The right side panel is held
on by four thumb screws and features a filtered fan mount that can hold either
a 120 mm or 140 mm fan. Just mind your
cable management if you use it as your fan blades might get very close to
cables behind the motherboard tray. Our case doesn't seem to have come with the
proper thumb screws for the glass side panel. Although I'm not surprised as
this review was massively delayed and we actually received this when it was still
a pre-production sample. So I can't really blame them for that. The back has
an interesting design where your motherboard and expansion port IO isn't
exactly flush with the outer part of the case, but is rather recessed a couple of
inches. There's also more venting and four PCI Express brackets. The bottom of
the case, unlike more conventional designs that have venting of some sort
for the power supply, is completely smooth. Now, let's have a look at the
inside of the case where things get very interesting. The PC06S is a microATX
case, but we used a miniITX motherboard for our build since we unfortunately
didn't have any microATX boards on hand, which is actually part of the reason why
this video was so delayed. I wanted to hopefully get a microATX board, but we
just still never got one. Anyways, getting all the parts screwed in wasn't
too bad, but with beauty often comes tight tolerances. So, as an additional
note, screwing some things in was easier with a couple extra hands. and doing
this as a twoperson build might be genuinely helpful. I would also
recommend to install the graphics card first before the motherboard. Now, it's
a little bit backwards, but the idea is once the motherboard is in, especially
with its heat sink on, it can kind of get in the way of installing the
graphics card, which is below it. So, if you install the graphics card first,
screw it in, get the PCI riser card out of the way, install the motherboard, and
then plug in the riser card, everything just kind of works. Speaking of the
graphics card, one of the most unique things about this case is that the
graphics card is mounted vertically so you can show it off in all of its
freaking glory. It sits right near the bottom of the case and connects to your
motherboard with a beautifully sleeved and pre-installed PCI Express riser
cable that I previously mentioned. The effect this produces is super awesome,
especially if you really want to make an aesthetic statement with your case. The
power supply is suspended in the upper right portion of the case. Since you
can't access your power supply at all from the outside of the case, what you
have to do is instead run the power cable through a hole on the back and
then through the back of the case and then up to the power supply. It's not a
huge deal, but yeah, it goes in back here. This really allows you to show off
your PSU. not something that's super common, especially with basement riddled
cases these days, but it also makes things a little bit cleaner looking at
the back. You also won't be able to access your power supplies onoff switch
as a note, however, so just be aware of that. There's also a removable cage for
your hard drives and SSDs in the bottom right, as well as an extra bracket
behind the motherboard tray that can mount up to three SSDs or two full-size
hard drives. Literally nothing in this case, except for a few thumb screws, is
toolless. Everything is held in with a rather large number of screws. The
owner's manual even indicates the case uses no less than 11 different types of
screws, which aren't always easy to tell
apart. I suggest using some magnetic parts trays of some sort or
organizational system to keep things split up and sorted. On the flip side
though, this results in a very sturdy final product when all is said and done,
which I know definitely works for some people who tend to enjoy the experience
of building a computer and the end result instead of just rushing through
it, picking up their screwdriver a minimal amount of times. This fits in
with uh what is, as far as I can tell, Leon Lee's general philosophy of making
things strong and stable, even if it
results in a longer, more tedious process. The case's cable management
situations somewhat reflects this idea as well. There are quite a few cable
management holes cut out in rather sensible places. Although I would have
liked to have seen some like black rubber grommets in order to make things
tidier, especially as some of the cutouts tend to be large and show off a
bit of the wiring. But theoretically with very clean wiring, this will
actually look very nice. And instead of having rubber grommet little leaflets
going all over the place, it's just a nice clean passound, which is probably
what I'm expecting they're going for. There also aren't any loops built into
the chassis on the back, though Leon Lee did include a few plastic adhesive 3M
loops and zip ties, allowing you to use what you need and no more than that,
making it take a little bit more time, but allowing it to be more or less
perfect. So, fitting in with that mantra. So, conclusion time. This isn't
the easiest case to build in, but it isn't trying to be either. If you like
the experience of building a computer, feeling at home surrounded by screws,
aluminum, and tempered glass, and want a case to show off a relatively small
system in in a relatively legendary way,
this may be the case for you. as long as your wallet is equally as legendary.
Tempered glass and aluminum aren't cheap. And neither is this case at $360
US, which from a Canadian perspective is closer to
$490. Ouch. Squarespace, you should you should
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because it just makes sense. There's like a storefront built in. Cover page.
If you if your mom's like, "You should get a job." You can like use a cover
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should. Thanks for watching this video, guys. If this video sucked, you know
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t-shirt that isn't from Transistor, which is a pretty cool game. But
anyways, going on the forum, becoming a contributor, or just becoming a member.
We like having people on there. It's cool. Now that you're done doing all
that kind of stuff, you might be wondering what to watch next. So, click here. This video is where I first saw
the PC08, which is maybe possibly going
to become my case. I don't really know, but I used it in the compensator build,
which there will be a V2 of, but Lionus is making it kind of difficult to make a
compensator build, which is supposed to be an overbuilt computer, when he just
goes around building like eight and $9,000 or no, he built a $30,000
computer, then he got an $8,000 chassis. Like, dude, what am I supposed to do?
How am I supposed to build like an overbuilt computer when that that's like
all the videos you make? I t