Silverstone Sugo SG05 Case Review
Introduction
How small can you go when building a higher end setup? It would seem that Silverstone thinks that they have the answer. The Silverstone Sugo SG05.
Silverstone, a proven titan among the sea of case manufacturers, touts a large portfolio of capable and attractive products ranging from large Extended-ATX Workstation cases, ATX Mid-Towers and to smaller Micro ATX Cube Style and Micro Tower cases. The Sugo SG05 is a logical step further into niche markets by positioning an even smaller case that offers more to the end user than cases from competitors. Existing Mini ITX cases are mainly orientated towards low power and heat embedded CPU/Motherboard solutions such as Intel Atom's and Via C7's and as a result they come bundled with weedy Power Supply Units and their dimensions offer little scope for expansion and aftermarket cooling solutions. This isn't a problem for the wide majority of Mini ITX users who just want a very small and basic machine destined for web browsing, general media and perhaps select Home Theater PC tasks. Sadly, to the disappointment of a small but growing crowd of people that want small yet powerful machines, there's a lack of cases that meet their criteria. What we have here is a true response to the needs of these people. Let's have a look...
Spec List
Initial Impressions and Design
The case arrived in simple brown cardboard packaging with Silverstone labels on it and a few details about the case itself. Silverstone had packaged the unit well in between two moulded blocks of polystyrene. Aside the case, a UK Kettle Power Lead and bag of screws were included.
The design of the case is pretty self explanatory. It's a cube style Small Form Factor case, were the motherboard is floor mounted. The small SFX Power Supply Unit is fitted to the rear and has a bottom mounted intake fan, which will act as the case's exhaust mechanism. To the top, sides and front are perforated sections of the case's panels. The left hand side, where a graphics card up to 9” in length in length may rest the panel is vented for the majority of it's length allowing the graphics card to receive cool and fresh air. To the right hand side is a smaller vented section around the area where the CPU socket on a Mini ITX/DTX board typically lies. Finally to the front, there is a large 120mm intake fan offering around 40CFM of airflow to all the components inside. In theory, everything seems to be put together with plenty of thought.
The designers of this case have taken on board that users may wish to use a relatively substantial graphics card to complement an otherwise speedy machine and have done so by leaving the left hand side of the case free of obstructions allowing for the fitment of graphics cards up to 9” in length. They've also adjusted the width of the case for a second PCI Blanking Plate area, which permits the use of graphics cards whose coolers occupy a second slot. Allowing for this has also made the case compatible with the slightly wider Mini DTX form factor that never really took off.
What if you don't want to use the dreaded low profile Intel/AMD stock cooler? Thankfully Silverstone took this into account as well by offering up to 78mm clearance for a CPU heatsink. After being spoilt by today's tower based coolers you'd think that this isn't sufficient but actually this opens your cooling choices up considerably from flower style coolers from Zalman to traditional style heatsinks like the Scythe Shurken or even large behometh passive coolers such as the Coolermaster GeminII, Thermalright AXP 140 and Silverstone NT06-E. Either way, there's plenty of choice to keep even the warmest of Quad Core processors under control.
As far as Drives are concerned, the designers have nicely implemented options for 2.5” or 3.25” Hard Disk Drives or even both on a two piece drive cage which is removable for ease of installation. They have however restricted the choice of Optical Drives to Slimline Laptop style drives only, a slight nuisance but not a big deal at all.
The final part of the design that I wanted to point out is the Power Supply Unit. Silverstone has bundled a 300W ATX2.0 PSU by Fortron Source into the build. 300W may seem somewhat paltry nowadays but you'd be surprised how much power a computer really requires. The PSU has plenty of 4pin Molex cables, SATA cables and most importantly a 6pin PCI-E cable. We'll investigate how it performs later on.
Test Setup
The test setup for the case in question is as follows
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.00GHz CPU
Zotac GeForce 9300 WiFi Mini ITX Motherboard
2GB Patriot PC2-6400 C4 RAM
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB HDD
Scythe Shuriken CPU Cooler
Xpertvision GeForce 8800GT 512mb GDDR3
Build Quality and Installation Thoughts
So how well is it built? Let's delve into a hypothetical scenario. Picture yourself stepping into a brand new Ford Fiesta. Everything seems to be put together fairly well and other than objective views towards the nature of it's aesthetics you have no gripes about it except for the fact that it has clearly been built to meet a fairly conservative budget. Now picture yourself stepping out of the Ford and into a Bentley Continental but you're surprised to find that it's build quality isn't all that different. This is very much how I was left feeling with the Silverstone Sugo SG05. It's certainly screwed together very well and it doesn't feel like it'll fall to bits if I were to do so much as touch it. The finish is generally quite attractive and everything down to the feel of the power button has some sense of thought, although I must say that said button emits the most obnoxious blue led possible. Alright, so it's build quality is far from shoddy. It's body is made of SECC Steel, which is lighter and thermally more conductive than regular Steel and the front bezel is made of plastic in matt black. Many midrange Micro ATX and ATX cases are built from the same sorts of material. Mind you, there's little to complain about it's build quality as it fits the bill and it still looks the business but ultimately, it's proudly wearing the Silverstone brand. Silverstone is the maker of the revolutionary Unibody Framed Temjin TJ07 chassis and a whole portfolio of cases built to a high standard. While not a disappointing effort, I would like to make it quite clear that this case certainly does not meet the same standards as many of Silverstone's other cases.
Apart from what I've mentioned about the exterior, the interior is very nicely put together. The drive cages are bolted down in all the right places to prevent any resonance or vibrations caused by equipment with moving parts and the innards were completely free of sharp edges or flimsy material. It would have been nice to have seen a removable motherboard tray implemented into the case's design as it would have shortened the overall time to build the computer and more importantly would have increased the ease of installation.
With all those vents and the front 120mm fan it is quite the dust magnet! Within 7 days of use, dust filter was filling up with dust. This is good news though as actually hardly any dust seems to be finding it's way into the case, which means the filter is doing a fine job.
The fan filter after 7 days of use
Behind the fan filter lay a dust free environment
On the whole and for what it's worth, I believe that the case has been well designed. At £80 it's definitely ticking all of the boxes that it should be. So moving on, how well does that little transformer beavering away at the rear of the case perform?
Power Supply Unit Performance
The testing methodology behind the PSU testing was simple but a tad crude due to the lack of professional equipment. As we all know, BIOS and Software Voltage readings should often be taken with a pinch of salt and often the only way to be sure of what the true readings are to hook a separate Voltage Multimeters to your setup. First, the system was left to idle from a cold boot for 30 minutes. Next, the 3DMark06 application was executed and looped three times, to get an idea of how the Power Supply Unit performs under full load consisting of GPU and CPU. The test setup was left to idle after the 3DMark06 loop for 10 minutes, when finally Prime95's Small FFT Torture Test was ran for 30 minutes. This totals to about 40 minutes idle testing and 60 minutes load testing.
Now, the test setup has an approximate power consumption of 240W under full load, which is 80% of what the included Fortron Source 300W ATX2.0 Unit is rated at. Under these conditions, all three main Voltage rails were well within ATX specifications and were very stable throughout the tests. What's more impressive is that this little SFX PSU's 80mm fan could not be heard over the quiet 120mm fan at the front at all, nor was any “electrical squealing” noticed. These are all signs of a Power Supply Unit that has been put together exceedingly well. This is of course an “80PLUS” certified Power Supply Unit, which means that it has been tested by an independent organisation to be able to operate successfully at the Power Rating specified and at an overall efficiency of 80% so any results that fall short of what my findings are would be quite a disappointment.
**ADDED** Temperature Results
So I'm sure you'd all like to know quite how warm a fairly powerful system runs inside a case of this size. As someone who regularly participates in Folding@Home Distributed Computing projects, I took the opportunity to run both Folding@Home Multicore SMP and Folding@Home CUDA GPU2 applications simultaneously for approximately four days. It's no surprise that the system had not crashed but the noise levels remained consistent and low enough for me to sleep just meters away from the system and operating temperatures remained the same throughout the four day period. Temperatures are as follows.
While the time taken to return to initial idle temperatures was relatively high, I believe that this is to be expected, especially after such a long duration of full load. All in all, an impressive result and a true testiment of the SG05's ability to keep a relatively high end system cool without even a hint of instability. I have no doubt that had I not halted the Folding@Home Clients, the system would have quite happily pressed on with the task at hand for a long time to come!
Conclusion
So here I am with some facts and some figures poised to draw up a conclusion. I suppose as part of forming an overall judgement, one shouldn't have any form of bias over a product based on the traits of the companies' other products but it's too easy to do so. When you invest good money into the purchase of a case from Silverstone, it's usually a given that you're buying a durable enclosure for your system that'll see a number of upgrade cycles. It's airflow will be good and so will noise levels. The general design is likely to be well thought out and aesthetically it'll be fairly pleasing. Most of these factors are generally a given with a Silverstone case and the Sugo SG05 is no exception. Aside the materials used for it's construction, it seems to follow the same Silverstone formula for a good case and while it hasn't surprised me, it actually is something special as it pretty much is a one of a kind on the market today. Aside opting for a Shuttle XPC Barebone style setup, it's hard to see how it's even possible to build a computer from scratch of this size that will accommodate dual slot graphics cards, quad core CPU's, up to two hard disk drives and a slimline optical drive. It's great to see something different appear on the market that allows the end user to have more choice and that too, choice at a sensible price. Good things come in small packages and this is certainly one of them.
So to summarise, I see this as a highly capable chassis for the sorts of end user that need the additional space and power capacity for a relatively fast setup that's also reasonably portable and can be hidden away. It's exceptional versatility however comes at a price in that the case is quite large for what it is and if you have no intention of stuffing it with higher end hardware, there isn't much point in opting for it. All in all a great product and if it suits you, I highly recommend it. You haven't got many alternatives anyway
The Good
-Well thought out.
-Quiet.
-Power Supply Unit is reliable.
-Excellent versatility for a Mini ITX/DTX Chassis.
-Well priced at just £80.
The Bad
-There's nothing “Silverstone” about the materials it's made from.
-Lack of Motherboard tray makes it more tricky to install larger components.
-It's quite large compared to existing Mini ITX cases.
As always comments and questions welcomed
haha
