Photos Part Three: Hardware Installation and Testing
It’s pretty cramped inside this case, the order of operations is important. The motherboard goes in first, then the power cables are plugged in, then the HDD and data cables. It takes a fair amount of cleverness to get the Z77-ITX board in place, thankfully the board came with a CPU power cable extender or I would have been completely out of luck.
Here’s stage one:
Next up, the hard drive. SSD in this case:
The top, all finished:
Despite the small space, decent wire management was possible. It took a bit though.
Lastly with the lid on:
The CPU fan is the only fan, but it blows a fair amount of air on everything.
Fairly obviously there is no room for an optical drive inside this case, to install an OS you’ll either need to put the installer on a USB thumbdrive or use an external optical drive. Or you can run it with the top off and hook up an internal optical drive temporarily.
The CPU I used was an Intel Core i5 3570k, I found that even in a tiny case it was quite happy and ran very cool in sustained load testing. It is worth noting that the CPU alone is rated to take 77 watts of 12v, 17w over the maximum spec of this PSU (though well under Antec’s box rating). I do not recommend following my example here. I disabled two cores to limit the power draw and tracked the power draw from the wall with a Kill-a-watt meter. Doing so I found that four cores plus graphics would just barely stay within the safe range for overall wattage assuming fairly standard efficiency in the PSU bits (both the power brick and the PCB in the case). The 12v rail was likely being overloaded slightly. I strongly recommend that you stick to a dual core setup, however. Or use an alternative power source. It worked for me, but I have a fairly cool ambient temperature and once again, I do NOT recommend overloading any power supply.
I did give it a sustained load with all four cores and it survived that, the case is really very quiet as the Intel stock cooler doesn’t make much noise when it has this much access to fresh air and a stock clocked CPU under it.
All the USB ports work as well, which is pretty much the extent of what can be tested on this case!
