SilverStone SG05

Installation Continued

The graphics card is placed right alongside one of the case’s ventilated side panels, so has plenty of access to cool air, and is firmly secured into two expansion slots at the rear, allowing unrestricted exhaust of hot air via the card’s cooler. It’s effectively in its own thermal environment making this is a solid setup for keeping a "high end" GPU cool.

All of Nvidia’s GeForce GT200 cards are out as they all use 10.5” PCBs and ATI’s Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, measuring in at 9.5” with end mounted PCI-E power connectors are impossibly difficult to install. This leaves either a 9” PCB 8800 GT or 8800 GTS 512 (like we've used here - if you can find one though), or the 9” version of the GeForce GTS 250, but sourcing that is extremely difficult. Rather helpfully though ATI has just this week launched a card that’s perfect for the SG05 in the form of the 8” PCB dual slot Radeon HD 4770: an ideal inclusion.


While fitting the GPU proved simple, moving cables around inside the case once it was installed proved otherwise. Despite the generous area of space between the front of the case and the motherboard, the overly long power cables quickly become tough to manhandle out of the way because of the cramped state inside; a problem that only worsens when you try and reinstall the suspended drive trays.

The 3.5” hard disk drive bay which hangs below the slimline optical drive can easily foul the PSU’s cable trunk and, infuriatingly, a fitted SATA hard drive’s standard SATA connector will hit the rear side of any fitted graphics card, forcing you to use a (not included) 90° SATA connector to install any 3.5” hard disk. Having put together a mini-ITX build only to dismantle it to swap out the SATA connector, due to glaringly obvious design flaw, is undeniably a pain in the backside, and we’re disappointed this wasn’t picked up by SilverStone while the SG05 was in design.


However, with the PSU cables sufficiently twisted out of the way and an Akasa 90° SATA cable used instead, the drive assembly was refitted. While bizarrely lacking a 90° SATA cable, SilverStone includes a slimline optical to IDE connector with the SG05. We can’t help but think that cramming ribbon IDE cables into the already tight interior is a little over ambitious and there are plenty of SATA slimline drives available these days as well.

As far as builds go, the SG05 was hardly what we’d call easy and the process of tucking and tidying unruly cables in an attempt to get everything back inside the chassis was frustrating in the extreme. Still, the end result of squeezing a significant amount of hardware into a very small enclosure, won't lead to cable tidy heaven. This still ranks as one of the trickiest cases to build a system into we’ve encountered - although, drop the 3.5" hard drive that interferes with just about everything: fan airflow, cables, graphics card: and everything becomes a whole lot easier.