Installation and Performance

For testing, I grabbed an ITX setup I had in the office consisting of a Z270 Gigabyte motherboard, i7-7700K, Noctua cooler, and HyperX memory. That was all put together already, it dropped right in. From there I had a hard time finding a power supply that wasn’t in use. I ended up having to use an SFX power supply and a few extension cables because of how short the SFX cables are. The Tiny SFX power supply went in and had a lot of room around it, though like I mentioned before I wouldn’t try to pack a long ATX power supply in that space.

For a video card, I was originally going to use a Gigabyte GTX 1060 9Gbps card but I found out quickly that the 2 and a half slot wide card wouldn’t fit in this case at all. So keep that in mind when card shopping, nothing beyond a dual slot is going to fit at all. The cage that goes around the video card worked well but I have a feeling tall cards may run into issues with clearance for their power cables. As for wiring everything up, it actually went really quickly. The are grommeted holes on the right make quick work of most things and I was able to slip things like the 8 pin in from the holes above the board. The Velcro straps around on the back side helped a lot to get everything cleaned up as well. There wasn’t much too behind the motherboard tray but you can run everything up to the area next to it with the Velcro straps to hold it all in place.

With everything build, I was really loving how it all looks. The side window made it easy to see that good looking red interior and all of the wire management kept it all looking clean. All it is missing is some white or red interior lighting to set it all off.

Here is the front power indicator light, it does light up red to match everything else.

The cooling performance of the Elvolv ITX wasn’t too bad in our air cooled configuration. The 200mm fan up front did create some airflow but for the long term, I would most likely be looking to add a rear fan or even considering water cooling using a dual fan setup up top. Because of the single 200mm fan, the overall noise of the case was quiet though I will mention that because of its price point the metal used in the case is very thin so if you pack in a noisy cooler or video card the Evolve ITX isn’t really going to help keep that noise under control.