Photos Part Three: Installation (Twice!)
I installed the Z77-ITX WiFi board in two different cases, one is the rather tiny Antec ISK110 VESA and the other is my Thermaltake Armor Revo full tower. The Revo setup was used for the intensive testing and overclocking, while the Antec case was used to see if it would fit well and work well. I didn’t do any overclocking in the Antec case as the internal PSU is rated at 80w and the 3570k CPU I used is rated at 77w all by itself, the other bits in the system push the load over the limit even stock. I did spend some time working with the system in that case for the case’s review. Here’s how it looks:
It’s pretty cramped in there, but the end result is a very small computer with the power of a full on desktop. The CPU power adaptor included by Zotac made this possible, without it I’d have been out of luck.
Here we have a rear view (upside down…). Pushing the clear cmos button is going to require a pen or something similar. The Antenna ports in the rear plate had covers on them from the factory, that took some twisting and pulling to free up. The second Ethernet port was covered as well, a quick bend took care of that.
The board has a red LED and two green LEDs, one of the greens is for disk activity, the other green and the red are lit at all times.
Sitting next to the Armor Revo and bathed in the blue LED light from it the Z77-ITX and ISK110 VESA look even better:
In a larger case it looks a bit silly
And yes, you really can put serious GPUs in this thing…
This board is ideal for mITX cases built for LANparties and such, pair a modern CPU with a cooler that fits (none of mine do) with this board and a high end GPU and you have a lot of power in a small package.
My lack of a CPU cooler that fit was an issue for overclocking, but we’ll get to that in the next page.
Lastly here we have it with a mSATA disk installed. All you need at this point is power and you have an entire computer. A really, really compact computer.
