Cougar Spike Mini Gaming Tower Chassis Review

Installating time for the spike was a lightening quick 15 minutes, much faster than most systems I build and that’s for several simple reasons. This chassis will no support much in the way of water cooling and while I could have crammed some 120mm rads in the back spot, it’s really a little cramped and not required, there is however plenty of room for a tall air cooler, but in this case I’ve opted for out “just enough” Akasa cooler, which also helps keep things neat and tidy in there.

Cable routing is non exsistant but while things look a little scruffy it’s really not to bad in there. All the major airflow paths are free of obstruction and I was able to rout cables around the exterior of the major components so cooling shouldn’t be too much of an issue. This is of course helped by a modular PSU and had I used a non modular design, things would look very different, requiring a good few cable ties to keep excess wires out of the way.

Our 2.5″ SSD sits snug in the bottom of the chassis, leaving the top bays free for future expansion, but overall there is still plenty of space in here for extra hardware, perhaps even another GPU, although I would suggest getting some good intake fans if you plan to SLI / Crossfire in such a small chassis.

With the side panel back in place we can just about see the GPU and CPU coolers through the fan mounts, but overall the end result looks very presentable and the lack of cable management has little to no effect on the final appearance.