Thermaltake View 71 RGB Case review

today we’re going to take a look at the View 71 case from Thermaltake. I bought this case to build my new Threadripper PC in, so let’s find out what it’s got to offer, what it’s like to build in and some of the problems I had along the way. The View 71 is a black full tower case and is pretty large at 592mm in height, 577mm in depth, and 274mm in width. It’s fairly heavy too due to all that glass, with nothing installed it weighs in at 19.1kg. The case comes with a box of accessories, which includes various screws, cable ties, and the fan hub.

Let’s start with the outside of the case and work our way inside. The left, right, top and front sides are all covered in 5mm thick tempered glass, which I think looks pretty nice. The front has a full glass panel which can be removed by lifting it out from the bottom, I found that out the hard way when I went to pick the case up for the first time. There’s two pre installed Thermaltake 140mm ring RGB fans installed which sit behind the dust filter, but there’s also support for 3 120mm fans instead. The dust filter here is removed by taking off the front panel, then pulling it out from behind the glass. The front IO is right up the top, and from left to right it has a reset button, 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks, 2 USB 2.0 type-a ports, 2 usb 3.0 type-a ports, disk usage light, and finally the power button which lights up white when the system is powered on. I liked the design of the power button, it’s diagonal on the corner which matches the other corners all around the case.

Finally towards the bottom there’s an unobtrusive Thermaltake logo. On the back down the bottom is room for the up to 220mm long power supply, and working up we have room for 8 PCIe slots and a further 2 vertical ones, more on that later. There’s a single Thermaltake 140mm ring RGB fan, which also instead can support a single 120mm fan. Finally there’s three rubber grommets that can be used for water cooling. On the bottom there are four large rubber feet, the case is so heavy you don’t have to worry about it moving and these help with that, just be warned that while moving the case on my white table I found they left some marks behind that were a little difficult to rub off. There’s another dust filter down here too, it can be removed by sliding it out towards the back for cleaning and there’s support for 2 120mm fans. On the top there’s yet another glass panel, it comes off by lifting up the panel from the back. There’s a dust filter here which can be removed by first removing the panel, same as the front. There’s no fans installed here out of the box, however there’s support for up to 3 120mm fans, or 3 140mm fans.

The glass panels on both the left and right side are opened by simply unscrewing the thumbscrews and opening the door, and both glass panels are removed by lifting them up off of the hinges. The left side of the case allows you to see inside the main area where all your components will be installed. The right side lets you show off your cable management skills, or lack thereof in my case. I’m not sure how I feel about that, how I have the case on my desk doesn’t really matter so you don’t see it, but it’s something to be aware of if you usually hide the mess back there, you just may have to take more care in cable management, assuming you care. As you’ve probably noticed there are quite large gaps between the actual case and the glass panels, so it’s fairly open. I suspect this may aid in overall system cooling, but personally I just like the look, and my system is so quiet that I don’t need to worry about it letting any extra noise out.

Speaking of cooling, this case has 3 Thermaltake 140mm ring RGB fans pre installed as mentioned, and the included fan hub allows you to change the colours and effects, as well as fan speed at the press of a button. The only down side I had was that I mounted the hub inside the case, so I need to open the glass panel up to make any changes. You could mount it outside somehow, and run the cable to the motherboard through the gap between the case and the glass, but I don’t think it’d look very nice. So those are the externals, let’s take off the panels and dive inside. While building in the case you’ll want to remove all the glass panels, it makes the case a lot lighter and easier to move around, and there’s also less chance you’ll break a panel. I found some of the panels a bit hard to pull off, in some cases it felt like I had to rip them out, but they seem built to the task. You can optionally unscrew the glass from the plastic panel in the case of the top and front panel, but there’s no real point in doing this unless you want to clean the backside of the glass.

With the front and top panels you can remove the dust filter for cleaning from the underside after you take the panel off the case, so there’s no need to unscrew the glass panel, which in my case was actually pretty hard to unscrew and remove and get back on, so I don’t recommend it unless you really need to. It would have been nicer if the dust filters slid out nice and easy like the one on the bottom, but they’re not too hard to get to. Looking through the left side we can see the majority of space within the case. It supports Mini ITX, Micro ATX, ATX, and E-ATX sized motherboards. This is one of the reasons I bought the case, as I’m using the E-ATX sized X399 ASUS Zenith Extreme motherboard. Despite claiming E-ATX compatibility I did have some issues while installing the board that you want to be aware of.

Alright so we’ve got some nice rubber grommets here for cable management, great! Except that E-ATX boards completely cover these, making them useless. In order to route my cables I had to remove a rear drive bay panel and put the cables through this hole instead which doesn’t look as nice. Not only does the board cover the rubber grommets, I had to completely remove the rubber parts as the board wouldn’t sit flush with the case, preventing me from properly screwing it in, though this may just be due to this specific motherboard, as it has a backplate on it which is what was coming into contact with the rubber. So although you can certainly install an E-ATX board, you have to compromise on cable management which I wish I knew when buying it.

The case comes with a mount to let you mount your graphics card vertically, which I think is a cool option to have, however I was surprised to find out that the PCIe riser cable required to actually do this was not included with the case, so I haven’t tested it out yet. I guess good quality cables are added cost and perhaps most people would just have mounted normally?

In any case you can remove the mount by simply unscrewing it from the back, which is what I’ve done here as it would have gotten in the way while building. Something to keep in mind is that if you have a tall GPU it may come into contact with your CPU cooler depending on the size of each component.

There’s no included shroud for the power supply, which some people seem to prefer, personally I’d have liked to have had one but it is what it is. Just behind the front fans there’s a drive rack which has 4 bays for either 2.5” or 3.5” disks, it can also be removed if you’d instead prefer to use the space for something else like water cooling. Drives are installed by simply pulling out the sleds, installing your disk, and sliding it back in.

There’s more drive mounting spots on the right side too, each of these three panels can hold either 2 2.5” drives, or a single 3.5” drive for a total of 6 2.5” drives or 3 3.5” drives. Personally I’m not using any of these yet, as I’m relying purely on M.2 storage. You can remove them by unscrewing the thumbscrew and taking out the panel, I’ve had to do this for one of them as mentioned in order to route some cables. Once you remove the drive cage there’s a lot of space inside this case, which I think would be great for watercooling, although I’m yet to give that a go. Speaking of watercooling, the case has plenty of radiator support. The front and top can both take either 1 360mm or 1 420mm, the rear can take 1 120mm or 1 140mm, the right can take 1 360mm or 1 420mm, while the bottom can take 1 240mm. While we’re talking about sizes, the case has a height limit of 190mm for CPU coolers, and can fit in graphics cards up to 310mm long with the drive racks in, or 410mm with the racks removed.

This case cost me $259 AUD. There’s also a version for about $40 cheaper which has one less fan and the fans aren’t RGB, so if RGB isn’t your thing you could save some money with that instead. So what did you guys think about the View 71 case from Thermaltake? Aside from the small inconveniences noted such as the poor E-ATX support, no PSU shroud, no included PCIe riser cable, and to be honest just awkward to transport when fully assembled, it’s a nice looking case and overall I’ve enjoyed building with it. There’s plenty of space available, heaps of glass if that’s your thing, but that does come at a price. Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments.