Thermalright Copied Lian Li's Cheapest Fishtank and Charged More for It
Thermalright's first case is a panoramic glass box that owes its layout, its corner brace and its drive cage to a Lian Li costing less money. At $130 with no fans in the box, the A70 ARGB asks more than the thing it imitates while carrying defects and design oversights the original does not have. The company that built its name by undercutting everyone has finally shipped something that cannot.
Borrowed Homework at a Higher Price
The A70 is a fishtank: two glass panels meeting at a front corner, a triangular support at the joint, a shroud above the board, and a floating drive cage behind it. Every one of those is an O11 Vision idea, and the A70 even copies where Lian Li puts a monitor mount — the empty volume above the motherboard, which Lian Li advertises as space for an IPS display. Copying a layout is legal and common. Copying it without the reasoning underneath is how you inherit the problems further down.
Pricing is the part that does not survive contact. The base A70 was $130, the ARGB trim $130 to $136 depending on the sale, and the Vision with its built-in LCD $150 to $160. The O11 Vision Compact being imitated here runs $120 to $125 and includes fans. The base model has since fallen to $102, a real improvement that still leaves it less refined than other $100 cases. Thermalright's proposition has always been the cheapest credible option in a category. Here it is neither cheapest nor credible.
What the money gets you: ATX down to Mini-ITX, seven slots, 420mm of graphics card, a 168.4mm cooler limit, 200mm of power supply, black or white, and 120mm fans only. Three on the bottom, three on the side, two at the rear. No 140mm anywhere, which in this market is nearly unheard of. That is defensible if the design earns it — Lian Li's compact Vision makes the same call — and this case does not earn it.
One idea is genuinely interesting and it is not the glass. Two 120mm mounts at the rear plus a grommeted cutout could support externally mounted liquid cooling in a way almost nothing else on the market can. Somebody should develop that properly. The side radiator tray is removable and vibration damped, which is also correct.
Oversights You Meet During the Build
Install the motherboard and the expansion slot covers become inaccessible. That is not a taste issue, it is a sequence error in sheet metal, and it means adding a card later requires pulling the board. The large glass side panel cannot be fastened at all while the other two glass panels are screwed in for structural reasons, so you get the worst of both arrangements: a panel with no fastener and a disassembly order dictated by the corner pyramid — side, then top, then front, and back together in reverse.
Above the board sits a shroud with a tube comb, the clearest sign that nobody mocked this up around a real cooler. Most blocks need a tight bend to get underneath, routing tubes there implies mounting the radiator tube-side-up, which is bad practice for a closed loop, and the comb only clears roughly 13mm outside-diameter tubing without deforming it. The shroud protects nothing and restricts everything.
The drive cage has the same character. It holds two 3.5-inch drives, or one 3.5-inch plus two 2.5-inch, and fitting a 3.5-inch drive blocks screwdriver access to the SSD mounts and covers the cutouts along the board's bottom edge. Mounting positions are pushed as low as they go, jamming the power supply against the cage and leaving dead volume overhead — volume reserved for the LCD on the pricier Vision trim and simply wasted here. The bottom filter needs the case tipped to remove; the Lian Li version slides out sideways.
Two manufacturing faults turned up on arrival. One Type-A port was mangled badly enough to be unusable, with no shipping damage on the carton, which points at the line rather than the courier. And the adhesive behind the transparent corner support had visible bubbles on both samples. Neither is fatal. Both tell you something about how the rest of the case was assembled.
The Thermals Do Not Rescue It
Nothing in the A70's fan support matches a standard test rig, and no fans ship in the box, so the usual stock-fan run cannot happen at all. The figures that exist come from three 120mm side intakes borrowed from an Antec Flux, with a second run adding two reverse-blade bottom intakes. That is a fair way to obtain a number and an unfair way to compare prices, because the fans are part of what you did not buy.
Noise-normalised, the A70 finishes mid-field at best on the processor and only mid-pack on the graphics card, behind a Fractal Pop 2 Vision that includes fans for $90 to $100 and behind a Montech that can be cheaper still. Those are contested numbers produced with borrowed hardware, so read them as ordering rather than as gospel — but the ordering is consistent.
The diagnosis is visible in the geometry. The two glass panels leave a wide gap at the front edge, and under positive pressure with side intake, air escapes through that gap before it crosses anything worth cooling. The case leaks the air it just paid to move. Bottom intake helped the GPU more than the CPU, and running without the bottom filter produced the largest single improvement in that test — a result that cannot be compared fairly to other cases, because they were not run bare.
What I Think
$130 buys an empty panoramic box with a borrowed layout, two observable defects and a build sequence that punishes you for upgrading. Add three decent 120s and you have spent the price of cases that include them and cool better. The base model dropping to $102 makes it a plausible cheap fishtank rather than a good one, and the ARGB trim has not moved at all.
What bothers me is not that Thermalright is new to cases — everyone starts somewhere, and its coolers remain the value benchmark. It is that the value benchmark is not being applied. The twin rear 120mm mounts and the grommeted pass-through are the only original thinking in the product, and they are also the cheapest things to have designed. That is the case I would have wanted. What shipped is a $130 apology for a $125 original.