SilverStone Sugo SG08 Mini-ITX Case Review

Noise and Thermal Testing

I've mentioned before that when testing cases, I usually have a decent idea of how things are going to work out. That's a little less obvious with the SilverStone Sugo SG08. I think it's reasonable to expect that the CPU is going to run unbelievably cool with the 180mm fan bearing down on it, but the GPU has no active airflow outside of its own cooler. Smaller enclosures oftentimes also use the actual bulk of the video card to cordon off individual cooling regions, and that may very well happen here.

The Sugo SG08 was tested with the fan at both its low and high settings, and I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say the high setting is largely unnecessary.

Ambient temperatures during testing hovered around 23C.

Exactly like I said, the CPU thermals are pretty tough to beat. This was never going to be an issue with the SG08. It's worth noting that a small pocket of heat can build around the drive cage, though; there's no active airflow in that region either, just ventilation. For the most part I doubt that could ever become a serious issue; external hard drives are basically sold shipping in heat coffins and still work reasonably well.

Like I said, basically no reason to run the SG08's fan at high speed, at least in our stock configuration. At low, the SG08 isn't inaudible, but it's very pleasantly quiet.

Adding a low power GeForce to the equation does actually change things a little bit, though.

Low fan speed means sacrificing roughly a degree or two for much quieter acoustics, so that's not really a big deal. We do start to see at least a little separation in our results, and the extra heat generated from the video card starts to leak back into that storage pocket.

Our normally quiet GTS 450 Eco makes its presence a bit more readily known. Noise levels are still low, but one of the sacrifices made with the SG08 is that there's virtually nothing between you and the cooling fan on the graphics card.

At this point I'm actually kind of amused by the cooling system in the SG08. Virtually nothing doing on the GPU side, leading to some high but still workable temperatures, while the CPU still runs a beefy seven degrees cooler than our previous reigning champion, the BitFenix Prodigy.

Despite the high GPU temperatures, the SG08 is still one of the quietest Mini-ITX cases when the fan is set to low. That low setting seems to be just plain ideal, even oddly producing slightly better temperatures on the graphics card.