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. 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.

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. This was the part I was nervous about. As you may have noticed on the last slide, the cables from the power supply extend downward, right into the space where a full-length graphics card will go. Would they both fit? The answer was yes, but it was a close thing.BurntMyBacon - Monday, November 16, 2015 - link @quest_for_silence "Unfortunately those negative comments were mostly groundless/rather questionable" 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 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. If you find that you need more cooling, you can install an 80mm fan in the front, two 120mm fans on the top and bottom, and a 120mm fan or liquid-cooling system on the left side.

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. 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…

Log in

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. 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. 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.