After checking out SilentiumPC’s Regnum RG6V chassis, at that time I already had my eye on their Signum SG1V, and some of you actually asked for its review, before all as it also represents a very good balance of value for your money. And, here it is now, standing right next to me, so let me first go ahead and do a build in it.
SilentiumPC is actually a Polish-made brand and manufacturer, some of you outside of Europe actually asked me where they could find and buy their chassis, but currently, that’s not possible since they only sell in Europe as far as I know, but I will definitely send them over that message, so maybe they start their global market expansions soon, hope so because they do have some interesting value products.
Anyhow, it’s really noteworthy how SilentiumPC still manages to find it’s own design language which is still different from others, and that was one of the main reasons why this model caught my attention. The credit for this goes to this really cool looking, almost supersized honeycomb mesh style grill on the front, which looks even cooler once everything lights up. Above it we have your usual rundown of connectors, nothing too flashy, just two USB 3.0 type-A ports, 3,5 mm audio in and out jacks, and far away spaced from them on the other side power on, reset switch and LED indicator light.
SilentiumPC Signum SG1V – eye-catching
The left side of the chassis carries a lightly tinted tempered glass side panel which has a bit of a clumsy implementation I would say, the thing is that it’s not flush with the chassis frame, but it’s just put onto it so it comes off like it was an afterthought, which is a bit weird since the Regnum RG6V had a better solution. Pulling it off was pretty straightforward since we have four thumbs screws in each corner, while the glass sits on rubber grommets so it stays put when you remove all the screws, although I wouldn’t practice doing that unsupervised for a longer period of time, just to be on the safe side.
Speaking of being safe, on the right side of the SilentiumPC Signum SG1V Evo TG ARGB you won’t have a problem like that since we have a good old fashioned inconspicuous flat side panel, held by two thumbscrews on the back. What’s not held with screws are six of seven expansion slots on the back, where you can, unfortunately, see that those are the ones that once you pull them off, there’s no backsies, it’s off for good, like picking out a telephone number from a flier on a traffic light pole for a moving company service that you’re never going to use. You will get one removable and with a screw reinstallable cover, too bad they don’t provide you with like two additional ones in the bundle, I’ve seen that with some chassis. Back here on top, we have an I/O shield cutout and a 120 mm fan installation spot while moving down to the lobby floor, we have a place for a power supply, with a nice long and thick foam padding for it to be put on.
The chassis is overall pretty light, especially when you remove the tempered glass side panel, so it’s not to say that it’s super sturdy or ruggedly made with extra thick metal sheets, but it does give away a decent build quality feel. Its dimensions are pretty compact, short and sweet would be the words I would pick for it, which does translate in some awkwardness when it comes to installing the hardware in it.
Knowing what kind of experience I had with their Regnum RG6V, which is also one of their pretty downsized models, I was expecting something similar when it comes to insides of this model, that they would just slap on different exterior panels and that would be it, but suffice to say I was actually not completely right with that prediction.
Here I’m mostly referring to the back part of the chassis, while the inner main compartment is pretty much the same. We have a somewhat decent amount of space for doing a build, maybe a bit less since this chassis is around 20 mm shorter in length compared to Regnum RG6V, so it can get a bit tight in some places. We do have a cutout for the cables all around the motherboard tray, right, left and bottom, and one even, although not functional, to showcase your power supply, unfortunately, we don’t have any rubber grommets for them, which OK, I get it, it’s a really budget chassis selling for less than 60€ and has four ARGB 120 mm fans, so there have to be some compromises, otherwise I would start to wonder how did they make any profit out of it.
Four ARGB fans for Signum SG1V
Speaking of those fans, as I said, there’s a total of four of them in SilentiumPC Signum SG1V Evo TG ARGB, three on the front, and one on the back, their Stella HP ARGB 120 mm models, these ones are actually not the 4-pin PWM models, but three-pin ones, while on their website they only have the PWM, so I guess these ones come exclusively with the chassis. You have a few options in terms of controlling them, being it when it comes to their speed or lighting. One option is actually the main side-feature of this model, and that’s the fact that it has a controller hub with connection for both the fans, where headers on the hub itself are the 4-pin ones and their ARGB lighting.
From it we have two cables going directly to the motherboard, so you can collectively control both the speed and lighting, but in case you don’t have any type of RGB header on your motherboard, SilentiumPC does provide you with this handy dandy controller which then lets you power the fans RGB’s over a decided SATA power connection and controller them using the Reset switch on the chassis.
Staying in this right side compartment, although you’ll be greeted by a pretty messy stock cable situation, you’ll have plenty of room in that in-between space to do proper cable management, it’s going to be a challenge and it’s going to be hard to make it look decent, but it’s doable. There are few tie-down points on the back of the tray, so that alongside getting a couple of zip-ties from the bundle will make the whole process a bit easier.
Let’s jump over to storage options. We have two dedicated spots for the 3,5” drives in the drive cage found behind the power supply shroud and it can also of course take in 2,5”. The cage has two positions, which you can move about depending on what you plan to use, if you opt-in for a bigger radiator on the front which could dig into the bottom part of them, I suggest you push the cage on the second back position, although bear in mind that in that case, it’s better to have a shorter power supply because it’s going to be a tight fit for the cables. Or you can just remove it completely like I did since I didn’t use any other drives besides my large enough M.2 SSD that covers all my needs.
There’s also a two dedicated 2,5” drive spots behind the motherboard tray which are probably, let’s say just one of the more interesting solutions I’ve seen so far, but bottom line it works. We have this almost like an L shape profiles that stick out in each corner and sort of like hug the drive, obviously, it’s not a tool-less design, you have to use screws in order to secure them. I’ve actually ended up liking how it looks once I’ve tried putting some drives on there, just be careful when screwing them in, they’re a bit fragile and easily bend.
When it comes to cooling solutions, adding onto what I mentioned previously, on the front you can go for up to 360 mm radiator, but be aware of your power supply length, I had a pretty beefy 170 mm long Seasonic Prime TX power supply model with 140 mm fan, which would probably push the cage to its most front position, limiting you to a 240 mm radiator, so have that in mind, as well as the fact that there’s room to do a push-pull configuration, as there’s enough space for the fans behind the chassis front panel. Speaking of that, there’s a rather interesting solution when it comes to pulling it off in a form of this tab on the bottom instead of the cutout that you usually grab onto. Its implementation is kinda clumsy, because you have to tip over the chassis in order to get to it because you can’t just get your fingers through, and then you can pull it off, which also requires a little bit of more force than usual, so you kinda feel like you’re going to break something.
Anyway, I digress, back to the cooling setup possibilities. On the back you can put 120 mm radiator, while on top you can put up to 240 mm radiators in case your RAM doesn’t exceed 32 mm of height, which, well most of the today’s blingy looking RAM do, since there’s not that much room left between the chassis top panel and motherboard edge, even something like Corsair Vengeance LPX is 31 mm tall, so take that into consideration. This also suggests that there’s not that much room left around the CPU cooler for you to handle the 12V EPS cable, especially if you have a big air CPU cooler, so make sure that you route that cable prior to putting the motherboard with the cooler on. I’ve burned myself a couple of times not doing this beforehand, so it’s a good practice regardless of the chassis and build. I should make a curious geek series exploring the actual difference in how long does it take when you don’t build a PC using handy tricks vs doing so.
All of those intake spots have a dust filter covering their back, one big magnetic on the top which is flush with the panel, which you’ve probably noticed by now, there’s also one on the front panel, actually two small removable ones each side, and a big one, sort of like into the panel half-baked mesh filter in the middle, for which you’re probably better off cleaning it right here as it is. There’s one filter for the power supply on the bottom, which was a bit, well, let me just say challenging to put back. Also, the power supply wants to have any problems taking cold air into itself, since the chassis stands on pretty tall feet carrying a dense foam as a form of padding.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, there’s also two installation spots on top of the power supply shroud for 120 mm fans, but I don’t think that can do any good since we have hot air coming beneath it from the power supply and drives.
Serious value contender
Speaking of getting hot, I’ve used pretty much my standard configuration for my chassis testing, AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X paired with the Noctua NH-U12S Chromax.black and Sapphire RX 5600 XT Pulse graphics card, so I can pump some heat into it. I won’t go too deep into analysis, because this depends greatly from configuration to configuration, but as you can see here, everything was in-line temperature-wise, nothing out of the ordinary, actually very close to my open test-bed testing, even with fans running at default motherboards fan speed, with a minor improvement when blasted at full speed on the CPU temperature, and a bit more on the GPU temperature.
Most of this performance, besides the sheer amount of fans, comes from the fact that we have that big airy mesh front panel
Since I’m already mentioning full speed, just like with the RG6V, the fans are not that loud when the motherboard takes control over the fan speed with its default values, while at their full speed, they do get a bit loud as there is four of them after all, plus speeds above 2.000 RPM will do that with a 120 mm fan you as you’ll now hear.
So, in conclusion, is this chassis perfect? No, no it’s not, of course, nothing is ever perfect, it has its cons as every other product out there, but does it come close to it when you take into consideration what it represents in its segment, a value budget choice that looks good that has a decent amount of feature? Well, that it certainly does.
That’s it for this time, thanks for checking out my SilentiumPC Signum SG1V review, if you have any question feel free to hit me in the comments section of my YouTube video listed above, you can contact me via my social media channels!
