Cougar SX Series 80 PLUS Silver 850W Modular Power Supply Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,853 words · ~9 min read
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this is the cougar SX series 850 W power
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supply and if you want to find out more about this brand cougar you can go to
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cougar.com now I recommend you type that
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directly into your browser bar and do not type it into Google okay that is
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cougar world.com this power supply is AMD game ready it is Crossfire certified
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as well as SLI certified it is an 80 plus silver Power Supply and does
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feature a mod interface I mean one of the things I thought was really
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exceptional about this product is actually none of that because there's a
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million in one power supplies on the market but I really like the aesthetic
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of it there aren't too many guys out there that are really shaking up the
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look of power supplies so go ahead and get the camera on like more of a top
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down angle so that we can uh oh this is a nice package too
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actually so up here we find oh okay so
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this is just to make sure that the top of the box is like a black color
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so it looks kind of nice when you open it I guess potentially they could put
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something in there if they wanted to in the future so here we are we have this
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compartmentalized little packaging system here that we're going to go ahead
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and try to disassemble unbox if you
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will okay so there we
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are and there's some more modular cables
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in there and here is the power supply itself so hopefully I'm going to be able
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to put that back together all right here is a little uh presumably a quick start
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guide introduction warning and safety notes uh protect the PSU against
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moisture some obvious stuff like that how to install it uh warranty is uh 5
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years and cougar is actually you can see
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the manufactur contact right here is compy case so compy case has been around
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a long time they've been making case and power supplies for a very long time so
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it's not like cougar is a new company uh even though it is a new brand all right
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then we've got some basic specs here for the whole series of SX so their entire
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SX series is 80 plus silver although they do have other series of power
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supplies as well including the GX which is 80 plus gold as well as I believe
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it's shoot might be CX but yeah like I
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said you can check out more information on Cougar world so here's a little uh
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cougar cable tie that holds together the uh power supply connectors that are
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hardwired that's actually pretty nice like they've got a few pretty nice
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touches here I think this is pretty unique what they've done with the sleeving so you can see they're using a
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reasonably good quality sleeving which you don't see enough these days you
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can't actually see very easily the color of the cables underneath it you can see
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it if you look for it but like I said it's hiding the cables somewhat whereas
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a lot of sleevings seem to be like stretched like I can't even really
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demonstrate it with this one but it feels like it's stretched too thin and
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you can see all of the individual wires under it so here's the 24 pin connector
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you can see it is a 20 + 4 it's quite long so even if you have a bottom mount
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bottom mounted power supply you'll be able to reach up to the top let's have a
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look at the rest of the hardwired connectors because this can sometimes
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make or break a modular power supply in
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my opinion so let me see Okay so we've
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got two PCIe 6 plus2 pin so those pretty
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much Essential for an 850 W power supply I'm going to go ahead and assume you're
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running something that requires a couple PCIe connectors and then you have this
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is probably too many cables to have hardwired for this but we have an eight
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pin a 4 plus4 pin and then we have an
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additional four pin for CPU so this gives you every possible combination
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that you could need for up at the top left of your motherboard many
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motherboards today actually do require more than one 8 pin connector for
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example the Big Bang X power from MSI requires two 8 Pin connectors although
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there are also motherboards that require an eight pin and a four pin mostly on
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the server side so you'll be able to power whatever it is you need to
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regardless of all of that let's have a look at what else we
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have for included modular cables as well as oh cool we have more of these uh more
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of these cougar cable ties so these are just little velcro I really like these
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actually you can see the whole front of the of the cable tie is made of the um
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the hard side of the velcro the prickly side and then the entire back of it is
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made of the soft side so it's all teeth
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at the front and then it's all uh me kind at the back those are neat I
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like them I've said that a couple times now
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but I think you get the point all right all right let's see what we've got for modular connectors so back here we've
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got oh this is nice so this is a multi-rail power supply actually we
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should talk a little bit more about that we'll talk about the uh the rail layout
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so this is a four rail power supply and
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you can see that the labels are all clearly the labels the rails are all
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clearly labeled so 12v 1 is powering the peripherals 12v 3 is powering as well as
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12vt 4 is powering the PCIe as well as
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the extra eight pins
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hold on pause for a second 12vt 4 and 3
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are powering the PCI Express connectors so let's have a look at the modular
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cables that are included finally and we've got a couple red ones so you can
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see these red ones are both 6 plus2 PCI E so that means by default this power
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supply can power up to two high-end gpus
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which 850 wat should be more than adequate for and then we've got some
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more peripheral connectors so wow this is kind of an interesting layout we've
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got a single modular cable that has three SATA and two Molex then we have
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another modular cable that is three Molex so that is for purely Molex
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drives or peripherals then we have
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another one that is three SATA and one Molex and then finally we have one that
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is fora okay so that gives you quite the
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combination that you can plug in and really that's what modular power supplies are all about
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flexibility so let's talk more more about the unit itself you can see here
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on the bottom it uses a pretty special fan so this is a hydrodynamic bearing
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140 mm fan and it uses a very different layout to the blades I'm not sure how
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well you can see that but cougar claims
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that with this blade design you're able to get more silent performance and a
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longer lifespan with the blade design as well as the bearing design that goes
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into this fan so that's pretty cool you can see it's got silver accents here to
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go with its 80 plus silver rating as well as a very very cool finish to the
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paint like this is uh this is a very
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very neat finish you can see that it kind of uh Sparkles and shines but it is
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a purely black paint and all of that texture is actually right in the surface
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of the paint so here we've got the cougar logo which is again silver
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because this is an 80 plus silver Power Supply and then we have a bit of an
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orange accent so that really matches the cables that come out of it which are
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black white and orange okay here we have ah yeah this is
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the information on was looking for so out of the 12vt Rails we can pull a
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maximum of 828 Watts 12vt rail 1 2 3 and
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four are capable of 22 22 24 and 24 amps
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respectively that is maximum per rail so that means you can't actually pull 22 +
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22 is 44 68 you can't actually pull like
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100 amps out of this thing but it means that the overcurrent protection which
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this unit does feature is not going to be triggered until you reach those
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numbers now let's just see if there's anything else we wanted to talk about oh
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right yeah because it's able to pull so much from the 12vt rail or not because
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but what allows it to pull so much from the 12vt rail is the DC todc technology
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so that keeps the voltage regulation good and it also means that very little
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of the internals of this power supply are actually dedicated to providing 3.3
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volt and 5vt power so what that means is
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you can pull a lot of the 12volt rail it's just a better design these days
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actually pause for a second so there are a couple more points to make due to the
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design of the power supply it does feature very low Ripple it also has all
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Japanese solid capacitors and it's rated
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at its rated power for up to 50° C so
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unlike many power supplies on the market that are rated for an unrealistic 30° or
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even lower than that this one is actually rated to deliver its power when
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it's under a loaded scenario so thank
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you for checking out this unboxing I think we talked about the back where we find a power switch as well as a power
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plug and more of an orange finish to the unit and yeah I mean really I wanted to
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talk mostly about the aesthetic of this thing cuz it's so cool thanks for
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checking out the unboxing don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips last
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thing included that I did forget to mention during the unboxing of this
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product is that it does include a very very thick gauge power connector so you
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can see this is quality right there they are not expecting this to uh melt or
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otherwise deform it look at this thing what is this here I can actually tell
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you yeah this is uh 14 14 gauge
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wire very beefy okay that was it