SilverStone SG05-450

Zitat: The SilverStone SG05-450 has been a lot of fun to work with and has managed to surprise me on a few different levels. The first thing that stands out, aside from the tiny footprint, is the fully painted chassis. Unpainted steel interiors scream cheapness and I´m glad to see that SilverStone went the extra mile to lay paint on the inside of this case. And speaking of the small footprint, there is actually a good bit of room to work with inside the case. The power supply is mounted just above the CPU socket yet there is still enough room to install a CPU cooler up to 82mm tall. The Zalman heatsink I used is only 66mm tall, leaving plenty of space for the intake fan. Do note that there is a small cooling fan on the bottom of the power supply just above the CPU socket. This fan and a CPU fan positioned to blow air into the heatsink could compete for airflow.I installed the heatsink fan with an inline Zalman voltage resistor, effectively reducing the fan to a whisper. With the lower RPM fan and the single quiet 120mm SilverStone AP121-L intake fan, I noted CPU idle temperatures right around 30C and full load temperatures around 65C. This was at stock CPU clock speeds, stock BIOS settings and a room temperature of 75F. These two fans combined resulted in a very quiet and pleasant system. As you can see here, the white LEDs in the SilverStone fan are a bit overpowered by the extremely bright blue LED indicators on the front of the case and also the green Tracer LEDs on the Crucial Ballistix memory inside the system. The LEDs on the front bezel are a bit too bright in my opinion and can be blinding if you are looking at the case head-on. Unfortunately I wasn´t able to install a slim optical drive in the case as I didn´t have one on hand, but this actually worked out alright for two reasons. First, I was able to use an external USB Blu-ray drive to install the operating system, etc. And more importantly, I was able to stuff all of the unused power supply cables in the optical drive bay, thus eliminating a lot of cable clutter, allowing the front intake fan to move air more freely. Other than the overly bright front LEDs, the only issue I found with the case was regarding the 3.5" hard drive cage. When installed, I noticed that the side of the cage blocked a good portion of the front intake fan - maybe around 25% of it. If you are planning to only use a 2.5" SSD like I did, you might as well remove the 3.5" drive cage completely. These two issues aside, the SilverStone SG05-450 is an excellent SFF chassis inside and out. I wouldn´t hesitate to recommend it to anyone looking to put together a Mini-ITX or Mini-DTX system. Paired with a capable motherboard like the Gigabyte H55N-USB3, an Intel Core Series processor and a mid-grade discrete graphics card, you have the perfect recipe for a very capable portable gaming system.