Layout

Already at a first glance the EVGA Z77 Mini ITX looks very good with its harmonic design. EVGA uses a black PCB, black expansion slots and antracite colored coolers. The colors suite nicely and the different shades of black and grey are calming. The layout itself is well thought and concerning the samll form factor there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even big CPU coolers. Right above the PCI-Express-x16 slot there are four straigt SATA connectors. Placed like this it's possible to easily install a big and powerful graphics card without running into troubles.

EVGA equipped the Z77 Mini ITX with an eight phase current supply regarding CPU. The memory gets an additional phase for stable operation. EVGA managed to squeeze all the nine phases right onto the motherboard itself, not like ASUS who chose to put the power design onto an additional daughterboard. To offer maximum reliability EVGA uses IR3550M MOSFETs from International Rectifier which can cope with up to 60A current per phase.

Totally you'll find two DIMM-slots on the Z77 Mini ITX. At the moment there is no official information about the supported clock sepeed but we're quite sure that this board will be able to reach something between 2400 MHz and 2800 MHz easily, with the right CPU of course.

Southbridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via passive cooling blocks. The cooling blocks haven been positioned wisely, which means that they don't collide with memory or CPU cooler. Considering this is a just 17 x 17 centimeter small mini ITX board, there really is a lot of space for big coolers. Of course you can't compare this to a full ATX board but for mini ITX standards, this is really good.