A Closer Look - Inside

Both panels are easily removed without the need for any tools and the steel one also sports two magnetic dust filters to protect both vents from dirt and grime.


Looking at the interior, you can clearly see that the Chieftec Visio supports BTF motherboards, which is great to see. It also quickly becomes apparent, that the motherboard will tug in behind the pre-installed fans in the floor, so you will have to remove those to gain access to the three bottom screws to pin down the board fully. It is nice to see a full loadout of a whooping six fans, with the ones on the side and floor come with inverted blades, so that you get see the clean sides even though they pull air into the chassis. The downside is, that these fans have pretty short blades with a fairly large space at their ends to stay away from the frame. On the flip side, they all utilize PWM and the frames have built in ARGB elements in addition to the hubs. To be exact, Chieftec also sells these fans separately under the Nova ZF-1225RGB model. These launched around Feb 2021 which may explain the design and some wiring details.


While the Chieftec Visio unfortunately lacks grommets, the backside does have a good amount of zip tie hooks, which are just large enough to accept our red zip ties. The case also includes a Chieftec branded ARGB & PWM hub for exactly six units. Unfortunately, due to the six fans, you also get the biggest cable mess we have ever seen in a chassis. Each of these fans comes with two wires - one for ARGB and one PWM, which are all too long for a case of this size. On top of those 12 wires in total, each is designed to be daisy-chained, so you have to deal with 24 connectors.


On the floor, you can find three of those Nova fans, with their cables loosely grouped at the center and routed through an opening that is actually intended for the backside connectors of the BTF board. The case could have had a small opening on the side of the motherboard to provide a dedicate route leading to the backside of the tray along the floor of the case, as the Visio has none at all, actually. The side fans, are routed through the two openings in that area which are higher up.


In the back the six expansion slots are actually bridgeless, so you do have the potential of using a universal vertical GPU mounting kit here if such a device would clear the fans on the floor of course. Above that is that sixth fan, which has a traditional blade formation to push air out the back while showing its pretty side.


The HDD cage may look like it can only hold a single unit, and you may be forgiven for thinking so at first. But, this is actually a nice design highlight as the smartly placed screw mounting holes allow you to install a total of three units in specific order without ever having take the cage out of the chassis. First, one may add a 3.5" unit on the side facing the motherboard tray by routing screws all the way through the cage. Then, the 3.5" drive within the cage is slightly offset, so you can install its screws and lastly a 2.5" unit can co-exist right on the interior of the cage and may also be attached using screws - pretty clever. On the floor, you will find one more spot to add an SSD. While this is nice, it does get in the way of any backside BTF connectors a little.


In the ceiling, you can see the two larger cable routing holes above the motherboard area, which is where you will be routing any wires from an ATX based system as well as the cables from any cooling or AIO placed in the ceiling. There is lots of clearance, so traditional AIOs should not even overhang the motherboard.


All the wires within the Chieftec Visio are black, with the USB-C one sporting a nice flat-band variant. The case wiring comes in the form of traditional individual cables and plugs. While this works just fine, it would have been great to see a unified connector instead.