Silverstone cases might have impress us with some of their own style of cases to hold most of your silicone delights or just keep your rigs as safe as possible from wary hands, but this new mini-ATX board that they have made looked a good case to place your smaller budget rig for those lower end task or just a large enough case to hold your mini-board.
There are often many downsides when building small form factor PCs, one of which is the lack of stylish cases available. In this respect the Sugo is something of an anomaly. Not only are the sleek angles attractively put together, but opting for a miniature tower design gives the Sugo a similar appeal to other miniaturized goods such as notebooks or mini cheeseburgers. With the combination of good looks, miniature appeal and great build quality the Sugo SG03 is a tidy bit of kit.
The shiny brushed aluminum finish is a pleasure to set your eyes on even if it’s inevitably easy to fingerprint or scratch. Vanity panels run either side of the case, hiding the I/O ports to keep things looking tidy. The panel on the left hand side of the fascia hides two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, headphone and mic ports and a vertically orientated external 3.5in bay. Should you decide not to install a device here; a smart brushed aluminum blanking panel will keep things looking fittingly smart in its stead.
The vertical mounting of the PSU means that you’ll need to use a low-profile CPU cooler which – along with the tiny size of the Sugo – may limit your over clocking headroom though to be fair, there probably aren’t many people on the market looking for a case this size with a view of breaking any benchmarking records. Although the stock AMD or Intel cooler will fit, as ever we recommend fitting an aftermarket model. For our test kit cooler, we opted for a Zalman 8800 which sits far enough away from the PSU to benefit from the through-flow provided by the intake fan.
The Silverstone Sugo SG03 is a smart-looking case and a very clever piece of engineering. Everything slots cunningly together and the case makes efficient use of its surprisingly small dimensions. There’s sufficient cooling to allow you to build a reasonably fast PC, though clearly a Core 2 Duo chip and GeForce GTX 280 under load is close to the case’s limits in terms of cooling. It’s also a versatile chassis. It’s sleek shape means it wouldn’t be an eyesore while sitting in your living room and the fact that it can take a large graphics card without melting into a puddle of liquid components means that you could use it as portable gaming rig. Unlike the Sugo SG04, the SG03 doesn’t feature a handle but it’s a damn sight better looking and it wouldn’t be too much of a hardship to make on for it.
