Silverstone Sugo SG07 Review (featuring Zotac H55 ITX)

1. Introduction2. The Zotac H55 ITX Wi-Fi3. Silverstone Sugo SG07: The Chassis4. Silverstone Sugo SG07 - The Build5. Testing Methodology and Performance results6. Closing Thoughts7. View All Pages

Silverstone have created some stunning products and we have always been avid followers of the Sugo Range which redefined small form factor chassis designs when they were first released, making HTPC both practical and quite beautiful to look at.

The Sugo range has been in production for many years now and the seventh series has just been released … today we look at the Sugo SG 07 which aims to deliver enough cooling prowess to allow for high performance systems with maybe even a little overclocking.

The SG07 comes supplied with a killer 600W 80Plus Bronze power supply which copes with almost all single card solutions. Inside there is also a 180mm AP181 Air Penetrator fan, which we reviewed a short while ago. The main talking point however is the fact that this chassis can also house a graphics card up to 12.2 inches long which means, yes it can cope with a HD5970 (12.2 inches exactly) which we think is rather stunning.

Silverstone are also keen to promote the fact that the chassis and the power supply can handle the new nVidia GTX480 and even with the heat pipes on the top, it fits perfectly inside. All you need do is remove the fan frame (see above).

Chassis	Silverstone SUGO SG 07
Colour	Black
Material	Aluminium & Steel
Weight	4.9kg
Form Factor	Mini ITX only
Front Panel	Power/Reset Switches, 2x USB 2.0, Stereo, Mic
Drive Bays	1x external slim 5.25inch, 1x internal 3.5 inch, 2x 2.5 inch
Cooling	1x 180mm Silverstone Air Penetrator SST AP181 fan (supplied)
Power	Silverstone customised SST ST60F-SG 600W

For testing today we would like to thank Zotac for their kind support in offering a H55 Mini ITX board (Zotac H55 Mini ITX Wifi) which is retailing in the UK for around the £100-110 mark. This board is fully loaded and has such a comprehensive feature list you would be forgiven for thinking it was in fact full size. This board is a 1156 slot design on the Intel H55 chipset with support for up to 8GB of DDR3-1366mhz. It also has a full 16 x width PCI e slot for graphics cards.

Motherboard	Zotac H55 Mini ITX Wi-FI
Chipset	Intel H55 Express – passively cooled
Slot	Intel 1156
Memory support	DDR3 1066/1333mhz – up to 8GB (2x4GB modules)
Processor support	i7,i5 and i3
USB support	14 USB 2.0 ports (10 on back panel, 4 on header)
Audio	7.1 Channel High Definition Audio
Graphics	Intel graphics media accelerator HD with Dual Link DVI & HDMI outputs
Upscaling	High quality DVD upscaling
Sata Support	6 Sata 3.0 GB/s, 1 eSata 3.0GB/s
Networking	Wireless 802.11n Wifi (300mb/s) and Gigabit Lan
Additional features	Blu Ray premium audio support, HDMI Deepcolor and x.v. Color Support, DirectX 10 with Shader Model 4 onboard

The Zotac H55-ITX WiFi board arrives in a miniscule orange coloured box with details of the product on the front and back.

The bundle contains a well written manual, a handy installation guide, WiFi antenna (2), several converter cables, 3 orange sata cables (no 90 degree unfortunately) and a motherboard connectivity fascia for the rear of the chassis.

The motherboard is passively cooled and if it is the first time you have seen a Mini ITX board, be prepared to be blown away by the diminutive size of everything!

We listed the connectivity on the last page, but as you can see above there are more than enough ports, even for the most demanding of enthusiast user, we particularly like to see eSATA included – we use this a lot in the KitGuru offices.

The board is passively cooled, this is a good move, as KitGuru hates small, high speed fans. The Wi-Fi card can be seen above next to the ram slots on the right of the picture.

The mobo is 1156 slot which means it can handle Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processors from Intel. We will delve more into the system build later in the article.

The Bios is fully featured and we have taken a plethora of screenshots to show you below.

The Silverstone Sugo SG 07 arrives in a very attractively designed box, with the famous Silverstone logo in the top left corner.

Silverstone have really created such a beautifully understated chassis, those people who hate bright gaudy colours with glowing lights on every surface will be very attracted to this design. The subtle multitone colouring and bevelled edges looks so much better in the flesh. There are several USB 2.0 ports at the front as well as microphone and headphone/speaker jacks. Power and reset switches are lower down, on the edges of the surround.

The rear has a 80 plus Bronze sticker to remind you that there is a 600W power supply included, and its a rather impressive unit too, capable of powering quad core processors and high end graphics cards such as the GTX480 and HD5970. You will also notice the dual PCIe rails on the right, these are removed for graphics card installation. There is also a switch top left which controls the speed of the 180mm Air Penetrator fan, with a ‘low' or ‘high' setting.

Underneath, the case has four rubber feet which raise it off the ground and help with air flow. There is also a filtered fan vent for the power supply.

The top of the chassis is home to the massive 18cm Air Penetrator Silverstone fan, and this is also dust filtered (removable), to help keep internal maintenance to a minimum. We have already had an indepth look at this fan before, so head over here to catch up on the review.

This Air Penetrator design gives a very focused direct airflow straight onto the motherboard below which is perfect in a high performance restricted environment such as this.

Both sides of the chassis have many air holes as you can see above. The larger vented area (above left) is to help cool the graphics card area of the internal design.

Removing the outer cover is as easy as it gets, three simple screws are removed and after pulling backwards on the chassis the whole outer section slides off.

The 600W power supply can be seen from the right side (from front) of the chassis and it comes already installed with all the cables lying loose inside, ready for fitting. This is a welcome upgrade when compared to the older, rather weak 350W unit that was in the SG05 chassis.

The formidable sight of the Penetrator fan from the inside, you will notice the unusually designed grille system which is created to focus the air in a directly forward motion.

Intel very kindly donated a 655k processor for our build today … we love these processors as they have massive headroom over the reference speeds. We managed to get one overclocked to 5GHZ before with a Noctua NH D14 cooler.

Silverstone have made a NT06-E cooler which fits into this case and while it is passively designed, it utilises air from the Penetrator chassis fan above to aid with cooling. We however opted for a different method and asked Thermaltake for their latest Slim X3 low profile cooler which we liked the look of. It is actively cooled which is always a better idea in my mind if we want to overclock, even if it generates a few more dBa.

The Thermaltake SlimX3 is a tiny little cooler with a dual heatpipe design to aid the reduction of temperatures with fast Core i7 processors. This is built for 1156 slot so suits our build perfectly.

We thought this picture was worth including as you can see just how small the cooler is when next to a Thermaltake Contac 29.

Before mounting the cooler on the processor we have to attach two mounting brackets, which screw onto the underside of the cooler, on both sides. These are then rubber mounted to stop metal from touching the motherboard PCB.

We are using 8GB of Kingston Hyper X DDR1600mhz for our review today which we reviewed in the past. We have found Kingston memory to be very reliable and the heatspreaders help to reduce temperatures in such a small chassis.

The cooler fits perfectly on the board, leaving enough room for ram and graphics card installation on either side. Incidentally, you can use any slot 1156 cooler in this chassis, but it has to be under 117mm in height otherwise it will not fit.

The first thing we do is remove the top fan system which requires the removal of 3 screws. The Silverstone Penetrator then lifts out of the chassis revealing the motherboard mounting area below.

Fitting the motherboard is just like any other system build we have done before, although this particular build only needs 4 fitting screws on each corner of the PCB.

After we remove another section on the front area of the top of the chassis we have access to the hard drive rack mount system which can fit both 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch drives.

Fitting a couple of 2.5 inch drives is easy, they slot under the housing and are attached by several screws on each side. We decided to fit a 2.5 inch 320gb 7,200 mechanical drive for storage and later we also slotted in a 128GB Crucial C300 SSD (review coming shortly) for the Windows 7 operating system, to ensure we weren't waiting long for system boot.

The 3.5 inch bay is supplied with rubber grommets to reduce noise and vibration but there is absolutely no airflow in this area which might prove an issue if you fancy putting in a 10,000 rpm Raptor X as a boot drive.

Once we had our 2.5 inch drive installed, we ran the sata cable down the side of the chassis into the motherboard. It is worth pointing out that you need to use 90 degree sata connectors for these drives as the header will protrude out too far to fit into the drive. Zotac didn't supply any of these cables in their box, but we had a couple in our KitGuru drawer, luckily enough. Silverstone should really consider supplying one of these in the box as they are not something everyone will have handy at home. Factor in a couple of quid for a pair of these if you are ordering them online.

The insertion and removal of graphics cards can be achieved without having to remove the motherboard from the chassis and it is actually not that hard to do, even with a substantially sized board such as the overclocked HD5870 from HIS, seen above. There is a locking mechanism at the back of the chassis which is held by a couple of screws. This reattaches when the card is fitted to ensure no movement takes place. The Silverstone chassis can take dual slot cards so fitting high end boards is easy enough.

The HD5870 falls short of the maximum quoted graphics card design of 12.2 inches (HD5970 size), but as you can see in the image above, the two 6 pin power connectors are hooked into this board from the front, so it is actually taking up almost as much room as a HD5970. We really didn't experience any issues fitting this board, it is almost as painfree as installing the card in a full size case.

Once the graphics card is fitted and all the motherboard headers are connected its time to reclose the chassis up as seen above. It is difficult to keep the internals extremely tidy, but I spent some time and routed them under the front area which is semi sealed so it looks neater in the pictures above.

In reality you could swap out the bundled power supply for any other unit although Silverstone don't recommend it as the cables on this unit have been shortened intentionally to suit the dimensions of this case. The ATX and EPS12V power cables are long but the PCI Express cables for instance are significantly shorter.

There is also room for a slimline optical drive if you wanted to fit one, but we prefer to keep our Windows 7 install on a USB drive for speed and all our files are networked over gigabit, so we have no real need for optical media. I guess a Bluray drive would be an option for media buffs, however we would prefer a self powered USB 2.0 unit such as the Asus SBC 06 D1S U drive we reviewed here. It can be moved around between machines without hassle.

To give you an indication of the size of the Silverstone Sugo SG07, here it is resting on top of the Antec Dark Fleet DF 85 we reviewed last week. Yes, the fully kitted out Noctua NH D14 Austrian Sandwich (with extra 14cm fan to keep our overclocked AMD 1055T cool (4.3ghz) is probably about 2/3 the size of the SG07!

To test the Silverstone Sugo SG07 with Zotac H55 ITX Wifi motherboard we are using a set of relatively high end comparison products. To quickly recap we are using a Core i5 655k processor (review here) which is a Core i5 processor with hyperthreading, this runs at 3.2ghz. We have it cooled by a Thermaltake Slim X3 Low Profile cooler and we are using Noctua NT H1 high quality thermal paste. We are using 8GB of Hyper X DDR31600mhz by Kingston (review here). The graphics power is handled by the excellent HIS HD5870 iCooler V Turbo (reviewed here).

We set the 1800 Silverstone Penetrator Fan to low speeds for this testing as we don't think high is a realistic long term setting, it is noticeable and defeats the purpose of such a great media centre chassis. Room ambient temperatures were kept at a steady 25c via air conditioning in our test labs. Idle readings are measuring after 30 minutes of testing in the desktop after a fresh boot. We achieved our load results by looping Cinebench R11.5 with Furmark for 20 minutes then taking the highest result throughout this time period.

Thanks to the 180mm Penetrator fan these temperatures are as good as we would expect to see in a full size chassis and we were extremely satisfied with these results.

We next wanted to see if we could crank the overclock on the Core i5 655k – while we wont get anywhere near the 5ghz we achieved with the Noctua NH D14 in the past, we hope that 4ghz is a sweet spot we can achieve. We therefore increased the voltage by 0.1 in the bios and raised the unlocked multipler.

We managed to hit 4.05ghz with voltage around 1.32 but while idle temperatures looked fine, we wanted to retest under load. We should also note that the Zotac motherboard has a ‘clear CMOS' button which is accessible from the back without having to open the chassis. We had to use it quite a bit during our overclocking testing so this was a godsend.

This was a pleasant surprise for us as we managed to break the 4ghz mark without hitting 70c on either 655k core. While we could raise the voltage higher and possibly push the CPU to 4.2ghz we like to keep our temperatures well within check and what we have achieved would be a perfectly usable 24/7 set of parameters. The SG07 is clearly a small form factor case with strong overclocking potential because when we overclock our processor the ambient temperatures only fluctuate slightly.

Recently we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is  passively cooled and we use a Sapphire HD5670 Ultimate Edition graphics card which is also passively cooled. Ambient noise in the room is kept as low as possible. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the components we are testing. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

To test today we are using the Silverstone SG07 chassis with the supplied 600W PSU and 180mm Penetrator fan, we have however removed the fan from the 655k heatsink and have replaced the HIS HD5870 with a Sapphire HD5670 Ultimate Edition – this ensures we are only recording the noise from the Silverstone SG07 as it is supplied out of the box. The room rates as 21dBa  – the air conditioning unit in the far corner of the room causes this. We use a Digital Sound Level Noise Decibel Meter Style 2.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

With the 180mm fan on low we noticed that the PSU is adding a tiny amount of extra noise to the Penetrator fan noise output, but when on high the top mounted fan is overpowering any noise the PSU is making. On low settings the system is almost silent, but on high its clearly audible, there is no half way ground here. What would we use? Low all the time because high settings are slightly intrusive.

The Silverstone Sugo SG07 has thoroughly impressed the KitGuru lab monkeys over the last week. Everyone in our team has been impressed with the appearance, internal design and cooling performance.

While we are extremely satisfied with the 180mm Penetrator fan, we really find it uncomfortable long term at high settings, it generates quite a whine which in the context of a media center would prove to be annoying. We always leave it on low and even at these slower speeds it produces a massive amount of air flow which is more than capable of keeping temperatures firmly in check. The fact that we could get another 800mhz out of our 655k CPU without hitting 70c load is testament to the fans dynamic performance. High end Quad core processors will probably require slightly more modest core voltage increases to keep things totally stable. If all you are doing is watching media content and playing games on a 1080P TV then a reasonably clocked Core i5 CPU is more than enough.

When gaming for a long time with the overclocked HD5870 we found that the chassis design was absorbing some of the generated heat, helping the components to cool and from a design point of view Silverstone really do deserve credit for such a stellar construction.

Silverstone have managed to create one of the finest small form factor chassis designs on the market and it not only looks fanastic but you can build a stable, long term high end gaming system with a single slot high end graphics solution inside it. The HIS5870 Turbo had no problems staying cool inside the SG07 and we experienced no instability issues either.

The cost for the Silverstone SG 07 in the UK right now is £165 inc vat which is an extremely competitive price if you factor in the 600W power supply which we would estimate to be worth around £65 of the overall unit cost. It is extremely capable and can handle a GTX480 or HD5970, meaning you should never have to change it out, which is just as well as you can't buy the SG07 without it.

The only potential problem we experienced is that someone without a 90 degree Sata Cable would be left in a rather unpleasant situation if they wanted to mount one or two 2.5 inch drives. We think Silverstone should contemplate adding a couple of these cables (or even one) to the overall package.

The Zotac H55 Mini ITX Wi-Fi motherboard is just as impressive as the Silverstone SG07 and we found this product to be a perfect partner as Zotac offer a strong bundle with the board and have a great instruction manual if you have issues setting it up. The Wi-Fi element is well worth the extra money as we found the reception strength very strong, even through several rooms in a large building. The build quality is top drawer, the bios is comprehensive and the overclocking options work well.

Again, the only problem I experienced with the Zotac H55 mini ITX motherboard was the omission of any 90 degree Sata Connectors in the box. With a Mini ITX board we would urge Zotac to include at least 2 of these cables to aid with the system build.

KitGuru says: Both of these products are worthy of our highest award and both score 9/10 for overall excellence, performance and stability.

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