Cougar G1050 – GX 1050W Review

Insides & Cables

No good PSU review is complete without the reviewer risking his life by pulling apart the unit and then attempting to put it back together again. Well, OK that’s a bit of an over exaggeration, but in order to make the task of testing PSU’s more exciting, thinking of them like ticking time bombs certainly helps keep the blood pumping. DON’T TOUCH THE YELLOW AND BLACK WIRES…NOOOOO *BOOM*.

  

Taking a birds eye view of the unit, the first thing to grab my attention is the two large transformers slap-bang in the middle. This is a good thing as it shows that potentially the GX 1050 isn’t just one big +12v rail split virtually into six with a +3.3v/5v board tacked onto the side. But more likely a genuine dual +12v rail unit split in a similar way.

The overall layout of the unit is also quite neat with plenty of space around most of the components, and none of that white goopy goo smeared over everything which tends to hurt cooling. And while we’re on the subject of cooling, the fan used inside the GX 1050 is manufactured by Power Logic and pushes 95CFM at 33dBA.

 

The primary caps are manufactured by Nippon, a Japanese company that produces some of the best capacitors in the industry (and has a name very similar to how you’d describe a woman’s breasts on a cold day). Thankfully these Nippleon’s…I mean Nippon’s are rated to 105c, so there’s no chance of them bulging outwards any time soon.

 

The GX 1050 has two DC-DC daughter-boards that are mounted vertically in front of the main wire loom. These step down the voltage from +12v DC to +3.3v and +5v for the other main rails. Cougar has ensured that as much ripple as possible is suppressed at this stage by using a fairly large bank of solid state caps.

    

Moving on to the cables, we can see that Cougar has sleeved both the hard wired and modular connectors in the same black, white and orange sheath used on their other models. It’s the kind of thing that gets people split down the middle, and can attract as many customers ‘looking for something different’ as it will loose customers ‘looking for something plain’. I personally like it and would be almosy tempted to build a PC around the design….maybe another day 🙂

  

Aside from the usual assortment of SATA and Molex connectors, Cougar has furnished the GX 1050 with a total of six PCI-E connectors, all of which can be converted between 6/8-Pin formats. The ATX cable is also capable of powering both 20-Pin and 24-Pin motherboards as are the EPS-12v connectors. The full list can be seen below:

 

Now that we’ve got the formalities out of the way let’s move onto the testing…