Test System

Assembly

To gain full access to the interior of the chassis, remove the top fan cover as well as the side bracket for the ODD/HDD or liquid cooling. Doing so gives internal access from three sides, so you should have no issues attaching all the wires correctly. Thus, adding a motherboard here is easy as well. While we use a compact tower cooler for our ITX systems, the Sugo 14 can hold most tower air coolers with ease—even those with 140 fans.


Installing an SSD within the Sugo 14 is easy enough as you may remove the mounting plate of your choice, secure a drive to it, and put it back in place.


Even the one within the motherboard area is accessible enough for installation, or an upgrade, after system assembly. Alternatively, a drive mounted inside the front panel may be a bit harder to reach, as you would have to take off the front cover in addition to the top panel, but it does make connecting cables easier once you do, though you should still just pre-route them for easier storage expandability down the line.


While the side bracket is quite flexible, we will focus on installing a 3.5" drive alongside an ODD in our review system to take advantage of the fact that the Sugo 14 is one of the few cases that offers an external drive bay. As a first step, you are meant to install the storage drive and put it back onto the chassis, as the optical drive is meant to be pushed into the bay through the front later on.


As shown with the Palit GeForce RTX 2080, long and potent GPUs will easily fit inside the enclosure. That said, for as much consistency as possible during our thermal and noise benchmarks, we will be employing a shorter GeForce GTX 1650, which fits just fine as well.


Ideally, the power supply should be installed early on during assembly by sliding it into the bay and securing it with the supplied screws. SilverStone has pre-routed the power cable, so you just have to plug it in. As the PSU on/off switch is not accessible once the system build is complete, you should make sure to turn it on before covering things up.


The optical drive we use is actually quite old and thus rather long by today's standards. Even so, it fits just fine with its connectors accessible after installation. Thus, if our drive fits, yours should have even more spare room.


With everything installed, the Sugo 14 is pretty full on all sides, with a nice open space right above the CPU area, so there should be no issues with big coolers or airflow. This is also especially important for a 120 mm AIO in the ceiling since tubes need the space to reach the CPU block, for example.


As previously mentioned, you may flip the chassis on its side so that the setup looks a lot more traditional. The GPU is horizontal, with the CPU area above it, just like you would find in a classic tower these days. The only oddity here is naturally the PSU bay.

Finished Looks

As we will be using the chassis with the golden stripe in the front horizontally, we went ahead and installed the biggest feet on the underside of the case. There is no specific location you should place these, thus some creativity is allowed.


Once turned on, the power button in the front lights up white gently, and because of the full-size components, things are nice and quiet in operation.


All the sides allow for a tad bit of visibility inside the case, and the rear holds the power plug in the top-right corner above the expansion slots for the GPU—if the case were on its side, it would be to the right of them from this angle, both of which is just fine.