This month I built two systems with identical hardware component (except for the case). Here’s the list of components:

• Case 1: Silverstone Sugo SG02-F white
• Case 2: Arctic Cooling Silentium T11 white
• Motherboard: ASRock 880GMH/USB3 R2.0
• Processor: AMD Phenom X4 840 boxed
• Memory: Corsair XMS3 2x 2 GiB DDR3-1333
• Hard drive: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1 TB
• Power supply: be quiet! Pure Power 430W

Cases often don’t meet my high requirements. Many cases are sharp-edged, bad designed (inside and outside), use cheep plastic, and/or vibrate, because the hard drives confer their vibration to the case. The Sugo SG02-F case is not perfect, but I will recommend it. The Silentium T11 case has no shard edges, but I won’t recommend it. Too much plastic and optical not appealing.

You probably have to replace the boxed CPU heat sink and use a better power supply if you want a silent system.

How well do these components work with Ubuntu 10.10 (and probably other recent GNU/Linux distributions)? Perfectly. Everything that I tested worked:

• The USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports work with everything plugged in (mouse, keyboard, flash drives).
• Audio works (only stereo output tested; 5.1 sound was available in Pulseaudio)
• 2D and 3D graphics work with the free (libre) radeon driver (Compiz runs)
• LAN works