 Today we're going to be unboxing a case from Cougar. This is from their 6X series, so it is the 6XR9BB. It is a black case. Now we unboxed a power supply from Cougar a little while back, but this is the first case that we're going to be looking at from them. It is part of their gaming series, and as I mentioned in the power supply unboxing, even though Cougar is a relatively new brand, you will have seen many products on the market in the case and power supply categories from their parent company, which is HEC CompuCase. So they've been manufacturing cases for a lot longer than Cougar has been around. So we're going to go ahead and get this open, and hopefully I haven't broken anything yet. There we go. Okay, so it comes in a plain brown box. You can see it is double walled for protection, and it also has a pretty good foam casing around it. So you can see it's about an inch and a half thick on all sides, which means that your Cougar will arrive in 100% condition. I mean, unless you're shipping from Canada to Uzbekistan or, you know. If you really go really far out there, then yeah, you probably won't have too much success, but yeah. Let's go ahead and pull off the scratch resistant cover, and then there we have it. I saw this case initially around the time of, I believe, CES, so it's been quite a while since I've heard about it, and since it's even been on the market, and leading up until the point where I've actually had a chance to have a look at it. So the first thing I'm doing here is I'm just removing the masking tape and protective foam. So they've gone ahead and they've put some foam pieces in between the front door and the front bezel of the case just to make sure that it's not going to open and shut during transport and cause any problems for you there. So let's go ahead and get all that stuff removed. Alright, so the front of the case is quite clean looking, actually. We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, five and a quarter inch dry base, which you can see can be easily removed with these latches right here. There are, oh, that's kind of interesting. So for the top two, they've gone ahead and removed the metal covers, but for the bottom ones you'll have to go ahead and remove those yourself. They fit back in just like that, and then down at the bottom you can see we've actually got, here we are, a filtered cover for a 120 millimeter fan mount. You can see there's mesh in the front, then with a fan filter, so you can easily take this out, pop it off, clean it out, and then replace it. There we are. The rest of the front of the case, you can see there's more mesh once you close the front door, and this is actually quite nice. There's a bit of a brushed finish to the metal here, and then you've got some chrome accents, and so the front of the case looks very clean, very stylish, and then you have a front lock so that you won't have people turning on your computer, oh, actually no, the power and the reset are up at the top, so you won't have people opening up your drives if you want to lock the front of it. So there's a couple scuffs on the front, but those are actually okay. They come off no problem. There's some glossy stuff here that I hadn't seen before, and let's look at what we got on the front. So we have a power and reset switch, two USB 2.0 ports, front audio, as well as an eSATA port. So we pretty much got all of the essentials there. Then moving along to the top of the case, we've got sort of more mesh, a bit of an angled look to it overall, and on the side, this actually kind of reminds me of the Cooler Master 830, the Stacker 830, which is a bit of an older case, but it's just reminiscent of that. So it doesn't have a window, but the mesh side panel is actually quite clear. You can see through it very easily. So I'm going to go ahead and sort of hold my hand behind it so you can see how clear it is. So if you do put some case lighting inside this thing, you're going to have pretty good success seeing the components that you're trying to light up. All right, here we have accessories that are included. We also have internal cables and wiring, and let's just go ahead and sort this out before we try and get too much further into this. We can have a quick look at the back of the case, actually. Pretty nondescript back here. We've got 120 millimeter or 140 millimeter fan mount. We've got a space for the I.O. shield. We've got seven expansion ports as well as space for a standard ATX power supply. The case keys are fastened to the back of the case so that you will not lose them. And inside, let's have a look at what we've got. So we have four spots for 3.5 inch drives, and then you can see there are also included mounting points for 2.5 inch SSDs. So you can either use the tool-free mounts right here, and you can see these are quite flexible. But as soon as you put a hard drive in it, those will stiffen right up, and they'll hold themselves in much better. I've seen mechanisms like this before. They are quite effective. You can actually remove the whole 3.5 inch hard drive cage if you want, and I guess that would enable you to install longer graphics cards if you so desired. What I actually do in my own case is I have a 2.5 inch drive. I don't have any 3.5 inch drives in my case anymore. And I have a 2.5 inch drive velcroed out of the way, and then I've completely removed all the 3.5 inch mounting bays in my case just for better cooling, more openness, and for better overall airflow. So we've got an included 120 millimeter fan in the front, although there is no included fan in the back. So it looks like CompuCase, Cougar rather, has opted to go for a bottom front to top. There you see we have what appears to be a 140 millimeter fan in the top airflow design. So you can add more fans. You're going to have your power supply running here. So most modern power supplies have a 120 or 135 millimeter fan in the bottom. So you'll have airflow coming from the front of the case going towards the back, so you can add a fan here as well, and then exhausting also out the top. Now we've got tool-free mounting mechanisms in here for the 5.25 inch bays, which you will pull to unlock. And then, actually let me have a look at how this works. Oh, okay, actually that's really straightforward then. All you do, yeah, oh, when you slide the drive in, it locks itself. That's neat. So you can see there's a tab on the back. Shoot, I'm not sure if you're going to be able to see that. Anyway, there's a plastic tab on the back here, so as soon as you slide the drive in, it'll put the bolt into the side of the 5.25 inch drive, so that's pretty neat. And then let me see if there's anything else I want to talk about really briefly here. We've got PCI tool-free slot retention mechanisms, so I guess we can try to find out how those work as well. You might want to give me a minute with these ones. We figured it out. There are instructions right here, because apparently Cougar knows that that's going to be difficult. So all you do is... Whoops, okay. Well, to put it in, you just press on the top of the PCI slot, and then slip it in under the latch there, and then to pull it out, you do that. So it's not that complicated after all. Usually I don't use these tool-free PCI mechanisms anyway, because whenever you have dual PCI slot cards, they usually don't work anyhow. So, yeah, there's not that much benefit to it. Basically, the inside lacks cable management a little bit, but I mean, you've got a covered side panel, so it's not windowed. So as long as you've got sleeved wires, things aren't going to stand out too much. And then you've also got a pretty snazzy-looking front bezel. So overall, I'd say the appearance gets a pretty good rating from myself. Here's all of the hardware that needs to be included for mounting your motherboard, drives, and other things. And then last but not least, oh, okay, they've actually included a 5.25-inch to 3.5-inch bay adapter. So just in case you still use a floppy drive, or if you buy a 3.5-inch card reader or anything like that, they've gone ahead and included that, and hopefully that matches the front style. No, not quite. That's all right. So then you can install a 3.5-inch media card reader, or anything else you require. Thank you for checking out my unboxing, and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.