Cougar S700

An alluring cougar with an alarming bite.

When you think of a cougar, your mind probably jumps to older women preying on weak males. But this new brand, called Cougar, is nothing like this weird cultural phenomenon. Designed in Germany (though still built in Taiwan), the S700 is a 700W power supply rated to the 80 Plus Silver rating of up to 91 per cent, and offers enough cabling to keep any enthusiast system powered.

The cables themselves are very impressive, sheathed with a great nylon material and painted with orange/black/white stripes, much like a python. The unit itself is more appealing than an iceblock on a hot day, with a rough black shell mixing with smoothly painted orange, also sporting a large 135mm fan to keep temps under control. Impressively, the unit never became hot or even warm under load, exhausting cool air throughout all our testing and remaining relatively quiet.

Power needs are supplied via four 12V rails, two at 20A and two at 24A, that gives a total of 684W of 12V power. We loaded it up with an Intel i965 @ 3.6GHz (1.375V) and a 5970 Crossfired with a 5870. OCCT was run on the CPU while the Unigine Heaven benchmark ran on the cards, giving us a theoretical max 12V draw of these components of 638W.

At idle the 5V rail sat at 5.102V, barely wavering to 5.095V at load. However, the 12V rail sat at 12.276V idle - and once under stress, it dipped to 12.199...then kept falling to 11.835, 11.569 and even dipped as low as 11.4V. This is pretty atrocious, and is a hair away from breaking Intel spec. Keeping in mind that this load is pretty crazy though, the Cougar S700 will be a good choice for a single-card gaming rig - just don't aspire to Crossfire or SLI with it.