Shrinkage
I am weak...

I've been wanting to build a small PC for some time now but the cost of ITX motherboards was completely off-putting. However when I built my new PC I happened to buy a M-ATX board that was actually very small, that got me looking at M-ATX cases and that led me to the LianLi Dan A3. Compact, classy, not horrific money and with great write ups from the likes of Gamers Nexus, who usually don't like anything...

So even though I didn't need it, one becoming available hit me at a moment of weakness and I ordered it. It's really quite well made considering there's not a lot to it. Sure it loses Cthulhu Inside and the cheap fake neon from China, but it's oh so classy, looking like a wee Fractal North (very nice case I built a PC for a friend in, also highly recommended).

However that's not to say that everything is hunky dory, I have a couple of criticisms: Firstly it's set for the bottom fans to be 120mm only where the tops can be 140 or 120. There's the same amount of space down there and even the venting pretty much accommodates a pair of them, but it's not drilled for them. I've bodged one in (because it's what I was using), but it would be nice for the sake of a few more holes to have it supported by the factory. Likewise you can put the PSU on the back, but there's not quite enough space if you do that to get a fan in the front, nor is there a way of mounting it. Again, a bit of shuffling and you can bodge it in, but ultimately I decided to put the PSU drawing air from the front and the fan from the bottom feeding the blower 1080Ti.

I am easily irked by small things. There are two things that irk me in multiple ways in the following picture.

behold my irkage

The first is that there is a cable at the bottom (for the front USB-C) that I can't plug in because I bought a pikey mobo that doesn't have it (one of the many ways they upsell you a mobo). Fine. But there's more

I do have a PCI-E 1x slot as well as the 16x GPU slot. Firstly the GPU slot is one position down from the top of the M-ATX standard. That's fine, limits you a little in the ways of mahoosive GPUs it can take, but I'm never going to fit anything that big. Most mobo makers will put the 1x slot above it. Nice easy place to add a WiFi card for example, but no, MSI decided to put it directly under the GPU slot.

No one, in this day and age makes a 1 slot GPU. They simply don't exist anymore. So someone at MSI was taking the piss there. Could have put it one position down and at least supported 2 slot GPUs (of which I have) but nooooo, we're going to mock you by fitting a completely unusable socket.

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