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, Overclocked
SilverStone seems to have done an excellent job engineering the Sugo SG09 for CPU cooling, but graphics card cooling in our stock testing wasn't the revelation the processor side was. They've almost proved that you can still have a very small system with great thermals (admittedly sacrificing some thermal performance on the storage side), so how well did the SG09 handle our higher voltage overclocked testbed?
Just as well, as it turns out.
Testing was again done at an ambient temperature of ~23C with the top intake fan at both low and high speeds.
Graphics card temperatures are competitive, but they're not exceptional. Meanwhile the CPU temperatures continue to impress; the 180mm intake fan's low fan speed actually seems to be enough to basically saturate the cooling potential of the heatsink itself, as raising the fan speed offers virtually no improvement in performance.
Again, fan speeds are competitive. The reviewer's guide promises the SG09 is equipped to handle high performance, high heat components and by and large that seems to be true.
Unfortunately the case is still, frankly, kind of noisy. It does better here where overclocking pushes noise levels harder, but I continue to strongly suggest installing a fan controller. It's obvious the SG09 has a substantial amount of cooling power on tap, so the prudent thing would probably be to get system performance where you want it and then find a good balance between thermals and noise.
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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.