Vivo V10G ATX Case Review: Tempered Glass On The Cheap

Hardware Installation & Test Configuration

Accessories come in a plastic bag zip-tied to the hard drive racks. Inside, you will find various screws, motherboard standoffs, a single expansion-slot cover, a system speaker, and a manual.

The interior of the V10G is a decades-old design that dates back to the turn of the century. The cramped appearance is due to a large stamped-steel hard drive rack that extends from the top of the chassis to the bottom and covers more than a third of the main compartment. The rack is riveted in place and not removable without drilling out the rivets. To our eyes, this is not the type of internal layout that you want to accentuate with a full tempered-glass side panel.

The good news is that the interior of the chassis is larger than it appears and supports up to ATX motherboards. The seven expansion slots will accommodate multi-GPU setups, and you get more than enough room for most dual-GPU configurations and graphics cards up to 350mm long, depending on how many 3.5" hard drives you have installed. (The drives may jut into the video-card airspace.) Six of the seven expansion-slot covers are of the old punch-out style, so you will need to source a few screw-down covers if you reconfigure your system at a later date and need to fill in punched-out gaps.

There is a medium-size cable pass-through hole with rolled metal edges in the power-supply area for cable management. The way the Vivo V10G is designed, though, we see no real reason to run your cables behind the motherboard tray. There is also a large hole in the motherboard mounting plate behind the CPU socket area that allows for heatsink changes without having to remove the motherboard. (While we are on the subject, this chassis can accommodate CPU coolers up to 152mm tall.)

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The fact that this chassis lacks any pass-through holes in the motherboard tray means that all fan, audio, USB, and 12V motherboard power cables will be exposed. Adding insult to injury, Vivo chose to use cables that are white or bright blue, and they stand out like a sore thumb.

The previously mentioned hard drive rack measures 5.5" x 15.5" and is riveted to the frame of the case. In addition to two mounting locations for 3.5" drives at the bottom, the chassis has side mounting locations for two 2.5" drives and what appears to be a trio of leftover 5.25" drive bays in the top, even though this chassis has no openings in the front panel for externally accessible drives. 

The power supply mounts in the top of this chassis with its fan facing down. Although the company designed the V10G so that your PSU fan acts as an exhaust fan, this is not an ideal setup for anyone running an overclocked computer or a system with a silent/fanless power supply. Also, even though it is possible to mount power supplies as long as 240mm in this case, anything over 150mm will block the PSU cable pass-through hole. You will also notice that, because the sheet metal used in the construction of this chassis is so thin, heavier power supplies may sag under their own weight, as you can see above.

Cooling

Cooling duties are handled by a trio of 120mm LED (blue) fans. Although the case has a mounting location for a 120mm exhaust fan, no such fan is included from the factory. Clever enthusiasts, though, could easily re-purpose the bottom-most 120mm intake fan as an exhaust fan.

Radiators and all-in-one coolers can only be installed in the exhaust-fan mounting location. The good news: Not only can you install 120mm liquid coolers in a dual-fan configuration (with the radiator sandwiched between fans in a push-pull configuration), but the added exhaust fans also help to balance airflow in the chassis. The bad news? The intake-fan mounting locations in the front of the chassis are obscured by the non-removable hard drive racks, and the top of the chassis is taken up by the power supply.

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Test Configuration

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