Got A New PSU: The Cougar CM Power 700W

Yep, I finally decided to buy the 1st and the most important part of my planned Core i5 / Athlon II gaming rig (still undecided about the processor I want to buy): the PSU (Power Supply Unit).

A gaming rig needs to have a decent power supply to support the today's essential components; processors, high-end video cards (esp. dual video cards in either nVIDIA's SLI or ATI's Crossfire), SLI/Crossfire motherboards, cooling solutions (air or liquid cooling), multiple SATA HDDs (you never you might want to add another when ur out of disk space) and others related to gaming rig modding (like lighting). If PSU can't cope with the overall power load for those components, chances are it will degrade the overall performance of your gaming rig, or worse, your PSU might blow up in smoke (I read some posts in most tech forums about PSU blowing up from too much load bcoz of a lot of components inside.

Speaking of tech forums, I've searched all forums I can find through Google about what's the best high-end PSU at an affordable price. Sure, there's Corsair which is undoubtedly the best manufacturer of memory modules and PSUs. Problem is, I can't find any shops selling such products (except for Blinquetech, although too pricey for their pricetags). So I was planning on getting a Gigabyte ODIN Pro 800W, but at 7,900 Php, I'm lacking 3000 Php. And there was a Cougar CM Power 700W PSU at 4,380 Php. It's not as fancy as the Gigabyte ODIN Pro since it has no LED in the fan area, but at a overall current rating of 54A on both +12V rails (needs a combined current rating of 50A on 2 nVIDIA high end video cards in SLI mode) and a certified 80-Plus Bronze (which boasts of having 89% power efficiency, means less electric bill charges regardless of how much load the PSU is currently generating), who don't want buy it? Lol :D

After almost a month of thinking it over, I decided to purchase it, as waiting any longer would end it up getting sold out. When I got back home, I was excited to install it right away. Before that, I'm planing on taking some pictures of the new PSU that I bought, but since the digital camera was brought by my father who is now in Manila on a seminar, I took pics with my cellphone (Sony Ericsson K300i). After taking some pics, I decided to install it on my not-so-good gaming PC. It was pretty hard to manage the cables (not to mention that it's a Cougar CM Power, which CM stands for Cable Management) as they're too hard to bend it (I felt like I was bending a hard rubber), but it went smoothly after. I fired it up and took a good look of the PSU inside the case. The built-in fan measures 140mm and its pretty fast (and it changes speed depending on temperature), which is nice since heat from the inside of the PSU can be drawn outside, while my case fans draw heat out from the inside of the case.

Anyway, I have to wake up early. But before I end this, here are the pics I took a couple of hours ago (as of this writing):