Cougar Evolution BO
The Evolution BO by Cougar uses moderately-thin steel sheet to save cost and weight, focusing primarily on features. It’s still sturdy enough to qualify as medium-duty, especially with rolled-edge holes and internal channels designed to both stiffen and enhance cable routing.
Using the same metal structure as SilverStone’s PS06, the Evolution BO gives up some of the clearance above the motherboard that its competitor includes by adding a dual-fan clip-in bracket. Removing that bracket makes the space available again, and mounting fans directly is still an option if you need it. Even at 1.2” without the bracket, there’s not enough room here to stack a radiator with those optional fans.
Note the single installed standoff in the photo above, which has a locator pin rather than a screw hole. Roughly half of the remaining standoff locations are pressed into the motherboard tray, with a few screw-in standoff holes left to allow switching between microATX and full ATX motherboards.
The Evolution BO supports both 3.5” and 2.5” drives, with the larger drives pin-mounted on silicon vibration dampeners. Rather than starting the build here, I decided to use the case’s top-panel external mount.
The Evolution BO’s dual-control fan system is supposed to accommodate up to six fans, but we see only two headers in its attached cable kit. That’s because the firm decided to use splitters, rather than hard-wire the sextet of connectors.
