Cougar SX850 850W Power Supply Review

Installation & Testing
We will be installing the Cougar SX850 into our new test machine, which is inside of the Antec Dark Fleet DF-85 case.  Installation is very simple and only takes about 10 minutes.  I routed many of the cables around the back-side of the case.  The modular cables made installation easy since you only need to use the necessary cables, the others can just stay in the box.

Cougar SX850 850W Power Supply Cougar SX850 850W Power Supply

After we had the power supply installed we went ahead and powered on the system.  Our system is comprised of an Intel Core i7 965, Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard, 6GB of memory, Radeon 4870 X2 video card, 1TB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive and Cooler Master V6 GT CPU Cooler all inside the Antec Dark Fleet DF-85 case with 7 fans.

Initial spot checks on the 3.3V, 5V and 12V rails were 3.38V, 5V, and 12.48V respectively.  We used OCCT to test the power supply.  Unfortunately since this is a new test system for power supplies we do not have another 600-900W power supply to compare the Cougar SX850 to.

Here are our results from the OCCT test…

3v

5v

12v

As you can see that all of the rails fluctuated, that is expected.  All 3 of the rails were within the 5% fluctuation that we do like to see.  The 5V rail did undervolt down to 4.93V.  The 12V rail was probably the most impressive staying consistent throughout most of the test.

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