SilverStone Sugo SG09 Case Review: Someone at SilverStone Loves Tetris
by Dustin Sklavos on October 20, 2012 6:35 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- SilverStone
- MicroATX
Noise and Thermal Testing, Stock
Up until this point I've been casually suggesting that the SilverStone Sugo SG09's performance is, frankly, pretty stellar. As you'll see that's mostly true, as it's pretty hard to go too wrong when you have a 180mm fan blowing almost directly on to your processor. This is something SilverStone has traditionally understood pretty well: the best cooling is direct cooling. It's also why their designs oftentimes deviate a bit from the norm.
You'll note that I tested with our standard ATX/Micro-ATX testbed and not the Mini-ITX one. I elected to do this both for time concerns and to demonstrate what should be obvious when you're done looking at the charts: if the SG09 can handle an overclocked Micro-ATX build (spoiler alert: it can), then it should have no trouble with a powerful Mini-ITX rig. That said, I know it would've been ideal to see how the SG09 fared against something like the BitFenix Prodigy; to that end, all I can say is that these are two designs that look like they occupy similar space in the market, but they went very different directions.
Ambient temperatures were between 23C and 24C during testing. The top intake fan actually has a fan speed selector on the back, and so the SG09 was tested at both low and high settings.
Storage thermals aren't great; that's not surprising, something had to give. Graphics thermals are okay, but the CPU thermals are fantastic. I have some theories about the video card but I'll save them for later; for now, it's worth noting that raising the fan speed of the top intake fan actually increases temperatures for certain components, sacrificing efficiency elsewhere for brute force in cooling the CPU.
As you can see, you don't gain much headroom on the CPU running the top intake at a high speed, and in fact you actually lose some on the graphics card. I suspect this is due to the cooling design of our testbed video card, and I imagine the SG09 may be better suited for blower-style coolers given the position of the intake fan on the side of the case.
Unfortunately without any fan control for the exhaust fan or side intake, the SG09 is frankly on the loud side. SilverStone is using their Air Penetrator fans all over the case, and while these fans are fantastic at their job, they can produce a decent amount of noise without some kind of fan control. Given the thermal headroom available in the SG09 it may be prudent to install an expansion slot-based fan controller and dial down the fans.
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ViperV990 - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
You also don't usually see more than 2 DIMM slots on an ITX board, whereas 4 slots is the norm with MATX boards.Grok42 - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I especially agree that expansion options on MBs are way over rated with two exceptions. I want the option to have a single discrete video card and as much memory as possible. I'll probably go mATX so I can have 32GB of memory. Unfortunately, I will drag along a bunch of useless cruft like pci-x slots, crazy amounts of USB headers and more SATA ports than I can ever possibly use. I can understand that there are plenty of people who want to build an overclocked dual GPU file server server with 6TB of storage with a Blue-ray drive. However, seems like the market should start also look to provide for those that want to build streamlined elegant single purpose machines as well. The only examples of this are HTPC side and it seems time for that level of focus to happen on the desktop.lmcd - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
AMD has a terrible mini-ITX board selection going for both AM3+ and FM2, so if you're looking at AMD you can't really go ITX. There might be a board or two for either of the sockets I just mentioned but they definitely don't have a full lineup there.EnzoFX - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
Edit: 400W+, not 40W+.Dustin Sklavos - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
Actually overclocking is potentially much better on an mATX board as there's more space for more power phases and so on. Extra DIMM slots, more expandability, enough power phases to overclock higher, etc. Look at what ASUS had to do on their mITX Z77 board to get decent overclocking hardware built into it.EnzoFX - Sunday, October 21, 2012 - link
Which was my point. A decent ITX board can handle a decent overclock, what with overclocking being dead simple these days. So the real benefit is above average overclocks, and the lure of expandability, which I contest at being at odds with the typical ITX build. I realize this may be a great mATX case in terms of size and performance, so sorry if this comes off as a rant of the ITX space =P.We demand more focus from smaller cases haha.
tim851 - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
I agree. ITX-cases shouldn't cater to the Extreme OC audience or try to steal some workstation customers. ITX was made to be small.Even the ASrock board regularly achieves 4.5 ghz overclocks on 2500k/3570k cpus, if you look around the web. That will be fine for everyone outside competitive overclockers. As will 16 gigs of RAM.
I have a Q18 with such an oc'ed 2500k cooled by an H80. There's also 16 gigs of RAM, a 512 gig SSD and a GTX 670. And I've been spending much time trying to figure out if I couldn't cram all this into a Q03.
CloudFire - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
I know Anand has a youtube channel but I've seen mostly phone reviews on there. Why not do video reviews of cases too? I love reading articles, don't get me wrong but often times I love watching a video review more.Samus - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
really?exodios93 - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link
What's with all the small, reasonable cases?Review something big and pointless like a little devil PC-V8 please.