A Closer Look - Outside

The Chieftec Visio follows the playbook pretty closely when it comes to the overall dual-panel glass chassis design blueprint. Each of them has black stripes on three sides, with the edges that make up the corner come together to make it one big window into the interior. The chassis employs straight lines with a steel and plastic material mix. The steel feels pretty thin allowing you to flex it pretty easily, unfortunately.


Looking at the front, you can clearly see the pre-installed fans inside, thanks to the just lightly tinted glass. The Visio comes equipped with a black USB-C port, OEM blue USB-A, a plastic audio combo port and two clean looking buttons. The bigger is the power button with a center LED embedded in it. The smaller one is designed to be a reset switch, but Chieftec repurposes it to control the ARGB of the included controller instead. By not labeling this, you are still free to use it as a reset switch if you opt for motherboard control of the ARGB hub, which is a nice detail. Looking at the rear, you can see that the chassis sports an upright motherboard layout with the PSU and things like storage hidden away behind the motherboard tray.


The main side continues the all glass surface and gentle tint identical to the front. Chieftec has designed it so that there are no screws, just a very subtle tab to pull the glass off the chassis. On the backside, the same method of a tab and pins is employed, and this steel cover comes with two well-placed vents to allow for air flow for the side intake fans and the PSU.


In the rear, at the very bottom, you will find the six expansion slots. This means that there will likely be little to no room at the bottom edge of the board, as the chassis is already slicing off that seventh slot with barely any clearance towards the floor. On the upside, each slot is protected by a removable cover and there is a thumb screw equipped plate to close the gap that gets created during the tooling process to form these type of expansion slots. Above that there is a mounting position for a 120 or 140 mm fan. Chieftec includes a 120 mm unit here which is set to blow air out the back of the case. Thanks to the elongated mounting holes, you can adjust the vertical position of the cooling unit to best align with your setup.


On the left, what is essentially hidden behind the motherboard tray, there is an ATX PSU bay with one set of mounting holes. Above that, there is a vent behind which Chieftec has installed an HDD cage, which is held in place by four screws. As we will see later on, the cage is designed in a way that allows you to install all the drives without removing it, but during assembly you may want to route cables in that part of the chassis, so it would have been nice if these were thumb screws holding the cage in place instead.


In the top, there is a magnetic mesh dust filter on top of a vent which can hold three 120 mm or two 140 mm fans. Alternatively, you will also be able to install a radiator of up to 360 mm in size here with what looks to be plenty of clearance to the motherboard.


The entire underside is protected by a large dust filter. You may easily pull it out through the front of the case and thus will never have to move the system or tip it over. It is nice to see that the Chieftec Visio uses this setup, as this is the best possible implementation.