Cougar Spike Micro-ATX PC Case Review

System Build Images

The Cougar Spike looks pretty big empty, but let’s see what happens when we put some hardware inside this micro-ATX gaming chassis!

The Corsair HX850W semi-modular power supply easily fit in as did the ASUS Maximus Gene V micro-ATX motherboard. Next we installed a Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB hard drive, but ran into a small issue when installing the Kingston HyperX Predator 16GB 1866MHz memory kit.

The 3.5″ hard drive hangs out over the motherboard and is actually over one of the memory slots! The other set of slots aren’t blocked at all, but when we plugged in the SATA power cable things were very snug. The Kingston HyperX Predator heat spreaders are 53.9mm tall, so anything taller than that is going to give you serious issues. If you had some low profile memory like the Crucial Ballistix Sport VLP that is just 18.75mm tall, none of this would be an issue and you can use all the memory slots without concern!

Wth the memory situation figured out we installed a Thermalright Ultra 120 CPU cooler and an AMD Radeon HD 5870 video card. This video card is 11.1-inches in length and while it isn’t the newest card around, it is pretty long! Routing the 24-pin ATX power cable and PCIe power cabled to the video card was a bit iffy as they had to go in front of the CPU coolers fan. Then, we tried to put the door on the case!

The door fit on just fine, but there was less than 1mm of space between the door and the CPU cooler, so be sure to watch how tall your CPU cooler is! The CPU cooler that we are using is 160.5mm in height, so anything over that height likely won’t work unless you want to run your gaming PC with the door off!

At the end of the day our build in the Cougar Spike came out okay, but it was a bit tricky getting everything to fit properly. If you have tall memory modules and a monster HSF you might have some issues, but for the most part you’ll have that with any small form factor gaming case.