Cougar Case Solution 2

Built a computer for my mother-in-law, and completed it in less than an hour. Very easy to work inside, easy cable placement, just a fine case.

Great budget case. For ease of usability and design I'd give it 5 stars. For fit and finish I would give it 3 stars. It's typical fit and finish for this price range. Unless you're going for a >$100 Antec or Lian this is a great case due to a good design that includes USB 3.0, easy access from both sides, decent cable management, quality power and reset buttons, filter for power supply airflow, and a quiet fan. This case has a bottom power supply mount, which I don't like so much since it's not going to give you airflow on carpet. But I just cut out a thin piece of birch plywood and set the system on this.

Worked perfectly well. Plenty of room for installation using a full ATX board with the Zotac GTX 1060 Mini. Side panels come off super easy, screw-less drive bays, mounting points for your mobo no need for standoffs. Not a lot of room for cable management in the back, if you're concerned with that. A big honking behemoth GPU might require quite a bit of finagling especially if you're using aftermarket heat sink on your CPU. Great airflow even without additional fans. Possibly got some dead contacts for my power LED, or I might have plugged them in wrong. Not a big enough deal to worry about.

Has everything that you need and works great for the price

I settled on this case because I was working with limited space where the tower was going to sit and this one was the only non-mini sized case I found that would fit that was still a budget option. Definitely on the tight end for fitting in some full size components, but the only really tricky part was getting power to the motherboard without sacrificing cable management. Might be tougher for those with larger hands as well. The interior orange is truly terrible, but it was the only way it came and I wasn't about to try and paint it. It's not as noticeable where I have the case sitting, but it's definitely viewable through the side panel if your color scheme is important to you. I was going with black and green, so it messes things up a bit, but from the front I'm still happy. Love all the HDD bays that will allow for future expansion, though not all of them come with the little quick release clips for some reason. Taking off the front panel to clean the filters is a pain, thanks to the I/O connections, but that's my biggest critique of the design. The front isn't as sleek as some cases, but I like it fine. Adding additional fans was easy and they stay put without rattling around or anything. For the price, I'm pretty happy with this case overall and it was good for a first-time builder, especially thanks to all the built-ins. The metal is pretty thin in places, but I never put anything on mine and it still looks good as new two years later. Just wish it wasn't orange!

Great looking case, good cable management, nice airflow if setup properly. But there are some problems with fitting in the cpu and gpu. My motherboard (msi) just fits, some ports on the back cant be accessed, and i had to cut up part of the back to mount my graphics card, and because of that my graphics card is now being supported by a piece of plywood. Also the power button is actually the reset button and vice versa, and the usb 3.0 port in the front had to be adjusted to because the protector around it was partially broken. Its a bit of a headache but it looks spectacular in my opinion modest but still had character. I would wait for cougar to address some of these issues though before considering to purchase this.