Test System

Assembly

As mentioned, you should really start with the hard drives first. Odds are you will want to show off your SSD, which makes placing it on the rear of the motherboard tray seem best. It is held in place by four screws, which is simple but effective. However, it would have been nice if the holes were of the kind that allow you to mount larger flatheads with rubber rings to then push them in and down onto the surface to lock things down, since it would makes adding or changing drives considerably easier.


The additional bracket, which is also a fairly important structural piece, may hold either two 2.5" or a 3.5" drive. As it is a bit more covered, I chose to place the somewhat ugly, larger drive here. It is also held in place on the mounting plate by screws. That contraption is in turn sandwiched between the side panel and orange piece, and is secured with traditional screws.


Cougar has chosen to place the PSU bay on the chassis' front foot/stand. While its positioning is a bit unusual, it really helps lower the center of gravity and keeps the motherboard completely unobstructed in the front and top of the case. You will first have to put the grille in place, on top of the foot, to then mount the PSU frame to the PSU before putting it on top of the grille and screwing it down. Interestingly enough, the internal power leads face forward, which is great in terms of keeping these hidden, and their orientation also makes routing the power cable out through the back of the chassis a breeze.


Lastly, installing the motherboard is done by traditional means, with the use of spacers and screws. The open-air design makes accessing everything pretty simple, but you will, as such, need to spend some additional time on routing the cables nicely.


Cougar also includes three orange-bladed, LED-equipped fans with quite the nice grilles. I chose to put two into the front and one into the ceiling of the case.


With all the components in place, the only thing left is to attach the remaining rods for the side panels to their appropriate locations. With a bit of creative cable management, things don't even look so bad on the backside of the Cougar Conquer, and the insides are actually quite clean.

Finished Looks

With the glass side panels back in place, the Cougar Conquer makes a really sexy impression. While some may not like the large Cougar logos on the panels, they do suit the look well due to the very light tint. Cougar has done an excellent job of shaping the glass in a way that has it go well with the frame's overall design. A small, white LED lights up when the system is turned on to let you know that things are up and running.


You can clearly see all the hardware within the Cougar Conquer, which is another reason aside from the elaborate design to go for such a case. I can only imagine how cool things could look if you were to opt for an intricate RGB-equipped liquid-cooling setup.