Installation and Lighting

Installation of the Bitspower Summit M w/OLED CPU block on Intel's LGA 115x (and soon LGA 1200) is no different from most other such blocks in that the absence of an integrated socket backplate for CPU cooling requires you add one of your own. The Bitspower version has three pieces, with the rubber back pad in contact with the PCB to prevent electrical shorting and the metal back plane in contact via the included sticker pad. The backplate assemble has threaded holes which should align with those in the motherboard, and you may want to double check to ensure no components interfere here, as may be the case with crowded m-ITX motherboards. With that done, use the provided four screws through and upward the other way and have four of the plastic washers in before locking them in place with the metal nuts. This provides the base for the CPU block to go through and over the CPU IHS, so apply the thermal paste of your choice, place the block, and have the other four washers and springs over each of the four posts before locking them down in a diagonal manner using the thumb nuts until you run out of thread. This is a precise installation system with a lot of moving parts, but it is easily done if you go through the manual and take your time. Be sure to plug the LED cable into a compatible header on your motherboard or other such controller to call it a day.


Installation is even simpler on the Intel LGA 20xx HEDT platforms, as I expect is also the case with AMD AM4 platforms. Make sure you have the correct mounting bracket and screw the M4-threaded mounting posts into the cooler mounting holes in the motherboard. Then simply repeat the steps from before, beginning with the thermal paste application, and plug the LED cable into a compatible header on your motherboard or other such controller as before. This is where the lack of a second cable for the OLED display surprised me, and I will grant that I have not had experience with a lot of OLED blocks before. The cuplex kryos NEXT uses an internal USB header to connect to Aquasuite for their VISION OLED display, allowing user control over the display, and Bitspower instead has it all pre-configured within the same cable to provide power to the OLED display, which in turn gets the data from the onboard sensor we saw on the previous page.


Here is a look at some of the various lighting options, be it static or dynamic. As mentioned before, I appreciate Bitspower going with a more standard solution with onboard control from the various mainstream motherboard makers rather than a more proprietary solution. They do sell an expansion PCB/controller for those who need it, which is also what I used to demonstrate the lighting above. The onboard OLED display is also programmed to cycle between showing the coolant temperature in °C (in a range of 0-99 °C) and a chart of the same vs. time to quickly see the effect of CPU load, overclocking, and benchmarking.