Cougar Challenger Mid-Tower Chassis Review

Build time for the Challenger was 25mins, which is a pretty good build time give that I have to swap out the top hard drive bays for the smaller SSD ones. I will point out that all the drive trays support 2.5″ drives, I just wanted to test the smaller drive trays for the purpose of the review. I also took a little extra care with the cable management here and it looks like its paid off, making good use of the pre-cut holes and the generous amount of space behind the motherboard mounting plate.

Our CPU cooler, graphics card and power supply all have great airflow in here, with no extra cables hanging where they shouldn’t be. Plus with room for an additional two 120/140mm fans in the top, one in the base of the chassis and one on the side panel overall airflow is fantastic throughout.

Everything is neat and tidy around the back too, with the GTX 560 Ti having a superb amount of airflow thanks to the ventilated PCI slot covers the large ventilation area to the right hand side and the side panel fan mount.

Now that the side panel is in place you can see the side panel window really does give a great view of the systems components. If you really wanted to melt your eyes you could fit some orange LED lighting inside the chassis to really set off the black and orange styling of the case.

So now its time to power up the system and as you can see here the front fan glows a very menacing deep red, its a lot less bright than I was expecting given the rest of the chassis has colour and brightness turned all the way up to 11. But the subtle red glow from behind the grill does look great, especially in a dark room. Noise was near non existent from the system too, with the 200mm fan in the front able to run at a low RPM and the only audible fan in the system was our power supply, but you still had to get your ear close to the chassis to notice that.