Cougar Blazer Essence Open-Frame Case Review

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.