Cougar QBX Ultra Compact Gaming Case Mini-ITX

Product Information

The QBX is a wonderfully tight, and semi-frustrating, mini-ITX enclosure. On one hand, the stringent PSU requirements, poor documentation, and unique design that can make fitting parts into place a challenge will test your patience. However, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and if you take your time (and possibly make some concessions), you'll end up with a mini-ITX build that's actually about as mini as you can make it, if you max out the parts. It's a welcome trade-off, considering Cougar includes only a single fan: a 92mm rear exhaust, visible here... The QBX splayed open. A mini-ITX motherboard fits into the top-left corner, while the top-right holds the power supply. Zoom in on the picture and you can see circular half-globes rising out of the metal. That’s for the motherboard. It’s pre-risen! Although the Cougar QBX can take a full size ATX PSU, there is a catch – only PSUs up to 140 mm long will fit and they need to have their AC cable receptacle oriented in a particular way. According to the company's documentation (below), PSUs with the receptacle facing upwards are not compatible with the QBX. This allows the case to breathe, so to speak, though it also means things can get a bit noisy. While the QBX is not technically an open-air design, the side panels don't do much to dampen noise.

x 1 (опційно), зверху - кулер 120 мм x 2 (опційно), ззаду - кулер 90 мм x 1 (встановлений), знизу - кулер 120 мм x 2 (опційно), зліва - кулер 120 мм x 1, або радіатор - 240 мм з кулером 120 мм, або радіатор - 120 мм з кулером 120 ммThe interior of the QBX deceptively looks very spacious because of the case's length. Only the left half of the main tray is reserved for the motherboard. A large opening allows for the installation of coolers without having to remove the motherboard from the case. The large opening extends beyond the top end of the motherboard for the routing of cables. Smaller openings also exist to the right and bottom of the motherboard area for the same purpose, none of which is covered with a rubber grommet. The right half is almost entirely taken by the PSU, with a narrow strip reserved for the slim ODD drive. Noise is measured 0.5m from the case's front corner, on the side that opens. The numbers are corrected to the 1m industry standard by subtracting 6 decibels, which is used by many loudspeaker and fan manufacturers. Test Results You can also fit water-cooling solutions, a standard ATX power supply, and an optical disc drive inside the QBX, though as we'll discuss a bit later, there are caveats to certain component selections due to the size of the case. None of them is a deal killer, though they are reminders that there are inevitable trade-offs when building inside a case this small.

I avoid Fractal and NZXT like the plague. They are really just crappy quality. They completely ignore obvious design choices in every model...there's always one thing that utterly ruins the case, requiring some extreme modding and wasted time to work around.

With that massive dual chip GPU it leaves little room for cable management, there are more appropriate GPU's for iTX cases that are noticeably shorter. While the QBX only plays nice with mini-ITX motherboards, it's willing to mingle with some standard-size components. In fact, you can shove an elongated graphics card up to 13.7 inches long inside the QBX. As a point of reference, Nvidia's super-beefy GeForce GTX Titan X is 10.5 inches long, so even with a top-of-the-line card, there's room to spare. The front of the case has a Cougar badge applied towards the bottom, which is about the only piece of bling you'll find on this thing, if you want to call it that. There's an angle at the top that, along with the horizontal faux-brushed-aluminum strokes, gives the case a natural-looking flow to the top. Typically, this is where we'd like to see case's front-panel ports, but in this instance, the various holes for USB ports and audio inputs would have sullied the highbrow aesthetic. When I first tried to insert the MSI GTX 960, it was bumping up against the cables and wouldn’t align with the slot properly. So I unplugged the power cables and put the card in. It fit perfectly, with plenty of room to spare, length-wise. But there was a very, very small gap between card and power supply. Then there is the matter of power cables/etc going to devices and the board. Is this coming with custom short length cables?The PSU draws air in from the side and exhausts out the top.

SFF cases are inherently at a disadvantage when it comes to cooling. To account for that, both side panels on the QBX sport large cutouts, but instead of side windows, each panel sports a large mesh grille… BurntMyBacon - Monday, November 16, 2015 - link @quest_for_silence "Unfortunately those negative comments were mostly groundless/rather questionable" From top to bottom, there's a power button with an integrated LED, a drive-activity LED, two blue color-coded USB 3.0 ports, and separate headphone and microphone inputs.Storage is further expandable with a 2.5-inch bay hidden behind the motherboard tray, and you can also install an SSD in place of a slim optical drive. That gives you a total of up to four SSDs and one full-size hard drive. One way to make the most use of the options in a high-end setup would be to configure a pair of SSDs in RAID 0 for fast performance, install a massive hard drive for storage duties, and pop a slim Blu-ray burner into the optical-drive bay. And that would still leave you with a 2.5-inch bay to spare.