Cougar Blazer Essence Open-Frame Case Review

Open-air, skeletal-frame cases have been getting more and more popular of late but Cougar’s new Blazer Essence shrinks it down to a more manageable Mid Tower. The Cougar Essence provides a traditional build layout mixed into a stacked plate skeleton frame with two sides of tempered glass. We would like to thank Cougar for sending us the Blazer Essence to check out! Cougar’s take on the Blazer Essence: Blazer Essence is a compact metal open-frame gaming mid-tower case with a new aesthetic design, a superior combination of metal framing and full tempered glass panels. With support for up to ATX motherboards, it allows you to showcase your high-end components to create an amazing masterpiece beyond your imagination. With support for up to ATX motherboards, it allows you to showcase your high-end components to create an amazing masterpiece beyond your imagination. Key Features: Metal Framing Design Blazer Essence’s distinctive design is based on a powerful metal frame and COUGARʼs unique design DNA, present in every inch of its body. This case is a refined art piece! Superior Expandability The unique COUGAR esthetics design with a superior combination of metal framing and full tempered glass panels allow you to show your high-end components for everybody to see. It also allows you to create an amazing masterpiece beyond your imagination. Superb Cooling Performance Cooling is a critical factor for gamers, overclockers, and PC enthusiasts in general. With support for 240mm radiators and metal open-frame design to achieve extreme cooling performance. Ideal for Case Mods Blazer Essence’s unique metal frame design breaks away from traditional case designs. It provides an easy way to build and modify the case. Your bold modding concepts are achievable with creation of unlimited. A modders dream come true! Quick Specs: Product Name Blazer Essence Model No. CGR-5LMHO Case Form Factor Mid Tower Motherboard Type Mini ITX / Micro ATX / ATX Dimensions (WxHxD) 236 x 472 x 528 (mm) 9.3 x 18.6 x 20.8 (in) I/O Panel USB3.0 x 2, Mic x 1 / Audio x 1, Reset Button 3.5" Drive Bay 2 Max. 2.5" Drive Bay 3 Max. Expansion Slots 7 Cooling Fan Support Top 120mm x 2 Right Side 120mm x 2 Maximum Number of Fans 4 Max. Water Cooling Support Top 240mm / 120mm Right Side 240mm / 120mm Max. Graphics Card Length 310 (mm) / 12.2 (in) Max. CPU Cooler Height 170 (mm) / 6.7 (in) with extending tempered glass columns PSU Standard ATX PS2 Max. PSU length 160 (mm) / 6.3 (in) for Micro ATX and Mini ITX motherboards 140 (mm) / 5.5 (in) for ATX motherboard Tempered Glass Side Panel Both Sides 4mm Thick Packaging & Overview We don’t normally get too wound up on packaging, but Cougar goes above and beyond here. The main chassis sits down inside a block of foam. A few protrusions stick up and help hold the top tray that contains the glass, also completely contained in foam. Carefully tucked in the foam are a pair of power supply brackets, a box of accessories, and some extended window stand-offs. Inside the box is a manual, and assorted cable management items as well as all the required screws. Similar in design to the Cougar Blazer, the Essence is a more compact version, standing about 2.5 inches shorter, around an inch less deep, but just a touch wider. While the Blazer Essence does support ATX builds like the original Blazer, using a full-size board requires mounting the power supply towards the front of the case with a maximum power supply length of 140mm. mATX and ITX builds can use the rear bracket so that it opens up the front part of the case for the included pump/reservoir mount. A Closer Look Cougar’s Blazer Essence is a stacked Skeleton frame with tempered glass on both sides. The right side is also covered in class. Both tempered glass panels have a rather unique shape that blends seamlessly with the theme, and each features the Cougar logo. The main side glass is held on with 5 thumbscrews. Each screw into a stack of posts that build the frame of the case. Cougar includes a long set of posts if you need a little more room in your case. Once you install the longer posts, you get quite a bit more room inside your case, hand for things like water-cooled GPU’s with side terminal connections, or even very tall CPU coolers. If you REALLY want to go off the deep end, you can even stack the side posts for a very wide case, although this configuration isn’t intended. The rear of the case has a traditional cut out for the motherboard’s rear I/O panel. A typical seven expansions slots provide room for GPU’s and other cards and do not use dividers between the slots. You would be free to use an aftermarket vertical GPU mount here quite easily. Front-panel I/O consists of a USB 3.0 ports, HD Audio, and standard power/reset buttons and indicators. The Cougar Essence also supports 2x120mm fans or even a 240mm radiator at the top of the case. You can install an additional 240mm radiator on the motherboard panel, just forward of the motherboard tray. Notice there are a few keyhole-shaped areas on this side as well. Cougar includes vibration damping rubber sleeves that go over special screws. These can be installed on your drives to make mounts. One set of those keyhole-shaped spots on the rear of the motherboard tray is intended to provide a mounting location for 3.5” drives. Another large spot is partially concealed behind the front panel in the front of the case. We were a bit skeptical about how secure this is since there isn’t a screw or anything to hold the drive, but the rubber mounts kind of snap into the correct position and holds the drive surprisingly well. We wouldn’t roll the case down a hillside, but moving it around for LAN parties or cleaning isn’t going to dislodge the drives. Rest assured. 2.5” drives install similarly on the rear of the case. However, the front panel holds two drives on the outside of the inner frame, and these screw firmly into place and do not use the rubber mounts. System Build & Testing Internals will be as follows: ASUS ROG Strix B550-I Gaming AMD Ryzen 5 3700X 16GB of G.Skill Trident Z NEO 3200MHz ASUS Dual RTX 2070 512GB OCZ RD400 M.2 Thermaltake Toughpower PF1 ARGB 850W Building in Cougar’s Blazer Essence is quite easy. You can reach everything, and see everything easily, even though the latter can be a bit of a double-edged sword. We start out mounting our motherboard and power supply. You have to love modern computers. With only an M.2 drive for storage and using a CPU air cooler, there are very few cables to deal with. We install the GPU, the CPU cooler, and the memory kit, and we have 3 cables to run. The 8-pin CPU, 24-pin motherboard, and a single GPU cable that ends in a pair of 6+2-pin connectors. We ran the front panel cables to their respective locations and straightened cabling up a bit and we are pretty much done at this point. From here, we plug in the PSU and hit the power button, and all of our RGB enabled components spring to life! From here we can put the glass panels in place on the Blazer Essence. Careful cable management will be important to anyone who can’t stand a mess. The glass panels and skeletal design gives you exactly zero places to hide a mess of wiring. The Cougar logos are frosted and allow lighting to shine through. We’re not really a fan of large branding on items like cases, but Cougar does it tastefully here. Taking pictures through glass doesn’t to a build quite as much justice as it would get under your own eyes, but man does the Essence make even a simple build look good! Even the view from the rear has character. It’s hard not to just love the Essence! Modding Build Cougar’s list of features on the Blazer Essence includes “Ideal for Case Mods: Blazer Essence’s unique metal frame design breaks away from traditional case designs. It provides an easy way to build and modify the case. Your bold modding concepts are achievable with creation of unlimited. A modders dream come true!” Well, we wanted to try this out a little bit. The case doesn’t natively support EATX boards, but we wanted to try it anyway after holding a few parts up in the case to eyeball fitment. Internals will be as follows: MSI X570 Godlike Gaming AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 32GB of HyperX Fury RGB 3200MHz Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition 2TB Corsair MP600 Thermaltake Toughpower PF1 ARGB 850W The only real hurdle we run into fitting an oversized board in the Blazer Essence is power supply clearance. If we forgo the side 240mm radiator locations, there is plenty of room for the PSU forward of the motherboard. The included power supply brackets are well built and are more than capable of holding the power supply mounted from only one side. we drilled a couple of new holes just above and forward the side radiator mount area, being careful to control metal chips from the process. A pair of small #6-32 screws and matching nuts later, we have a new PSU mounting location that is reminiscent of many ITX case layouts. Now our over-sized Extended ATX board doesn’t have to compete for space. We mounted an EK-Classic Pump Reservoir 160 SPC PWM pump/res combo on the included universal mounting plate easily enough. We went ahead and threw the CPU and block mounting hardware in place, as well as the GPU to check clearance. The forward-most res mounting holes allow it to sit centered between the GPU and PSU. Our EKWB PE240 radiator proved to be just a touch too thick with fans to clear the top VRM heatsink, so we’ll have to swap it out with a thinner model. With the thinner rad and fans mounted, we could run the soft tubing and fill the loop. With only four PSU cables to run, twin 8-pin EPS, a 24-pin, and a PCIe cable with twin 6+2-pin connectors, the wiring was done quickly as well. Buttoned up, we have to say we really like how this simple mod came out! This puts a ton of power in mid-tower case, and we could easily run multiple graphics cards now. Final Thoughts & Conclusion Open frame type cases have betting ever more popular and Cougar’s Blazer Essence makes’s it easy to see why. The modding-friendly design makes it easy to go your own path and get a little out-of-the-box when you need. You can take the entire case apart with minimal tools down to the individual pieces that compose it. This is handy for those who like to paint or otherwise mod their case without spending hours and hours masking things off. I personally do powder-coating, so being able to throw individual pieces in the spray booth and then the oven is really nice. We don’t really need to comment on cooling, the case is almost entirely open so natural convection takes care of this without the need for tons of fans, but those in dusty environments may need to spend a little more time cleaning it than a traditional box case with directed (and likely filtered) airflow. The paint job and glass seem to be pretty resistant to smudges and fingerprints, so it’s fairly easy to keep looking good. The 4mm thick tempered glass strikes a nice balance between being solid, and not being so heavy that you can’t move the case around with it installed. All in all, we’re pretty impressed, and it’s hard to find anything to fault the Blazer Essence with. The signature orange bottom pieces are great looking but may clash with some builds. We think, to appeal to a wider audience, Cougar might have gone with a more neutral color scheme, perhaps with a gunmetal grey to stick with current market trends? The roughly $170 street price makes a compelling choice for many either way. Great Job Cougar!

Cougar Blazer Essence Open-Frame Case Review

Superb Open-frame Gaming Mid Tower

Packaging & Overview

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Packaging & Overview

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