Glow Lounge Glow Sugo B HTPC

The Silverstone Sugo S01 chassis is certainly not unattractive, although we prefer HTPC cases which mimic the horizontal design of hi-fi separates if you’re going to put them in your lounge. Slightly wider than a regular SFF, the Sugo is a good compromise between size and expansion potential. It has room for two 5.25in drives and two 3.5in hard disks, with the latter cooled by a dedicated 80mm fan.

There’s also a curious cowling over the expansion slots with room for two 80mm fans, which makes an ideal partner for the passively cooled NVIDIA GeForce 6600 graphics. If you wanted to add meatier graphics, it shouldn’t have any problems keeping that frosty either. Best of all, the Sugo is wide enough for a Micro-ATX motherboard, and has four blanking plate cut-outs on the back. So you can add a lot more adapter cards than most SFFs.

Sensibly, the Glow Lounge has partnered this system’s powerful CPU with Zalman’s CNPS7000B-ALCU SuperFlower, which is one of the quietest coolers around. In tandem with Cool’n’Quiet, the processor is kept under thermal control without any aggravating fan noise. The quiet PSU and chassis fans don’t let the side down, either.

Whilst this system can’t quite match the complete silence of Quiet PC’s D.Vine Media Center, it’s still not going to disgrace your lounge with unwanted hullabaloo.

The system incorporates a quartet of USB 2 ports both front and rear, plus 6-pin FireWire in both locations as well – useful if you want to hook up your digital camcorder. There’s also the ubiquitous LAN and six-channel audio on the rear, but no digital audio connectivity. Instead, the motherboard sports a parallel port, which seems a trifle redundant in this day and age.