Moving From Intel Ivy Bridge 3770K to Intel Broadwell 5775C

Surgery For The Mini ITX PC

Since the original build article featured step by step installation procedures we are just going to give you a really high level look at how everything went into the system.

This first shot might not look like we did anything, but the Intel Core i7-5775C processor has been seated and secured in the LGA1150 socket and the HyperX Predator 480GB M.2 PCIe SSD has been placed in the M.2 slot that is inside the ASUS MPCIE COMBO IV riser housing. The M.2 card simply slides into the house and is held in place by just the pressure of the metal pins in the M.2 slot!

Installing the ASUS Maximus VII Impact motherboard and the NZXT Kraken X41 liquid CPU cooler can be tricky as there really isn’t much space to work inside a true Mini ITX case. We had no issues getting the board in, but we discovered that the radiator used on the NZXT Kraken X41 is not only thicker, but also longer than the previous 140mm radiator on the CoolIT ECO II 140. The slime optical Blu-Ray SATA drive was able to be connected, but the AFT Pro-37U media card reader was unable to be connected as the pair of USB 3.0 Type B cables were just to bulky to be routed around the new cooler. We might go back to the CoolIT ECO II 140 if we miss it too much!

The final step is installing the power supply and we flipped it 180 degrees this time to see how it impacts board temperatures. We have all the needed power cables for the ASUS Maximus VII Impact motherboard and then SATA and 4-pin molex cables being used, so it was extremely tough to shoehorn everything in the chassis and make it look presentable!