Cougar G800 GX-Series 800W Power Supply Review

The first thing you see when opening the PSU is the fan, this unit utilises it’s own 140mm Hydro Dynamic Bearing fan which is claimed to last longer and not degrade and become noisier over time as standard oil bearings do, exactly what you want in a PSU.

The first stage inside a PSU is the transient filtering. This is where the unit filters the AC power coming from the mains so there is less noise which is extremely important as it impacts the efficiency and safety of the later stages, which is partly the reason you see people investing hundreds of pounds in UPS systems which do a similar job. To do this, a system of capacitors, ferrite coils and a metal oxide varistor is used. The quality of this stage is determined by the number of components doing the filtering. Many generic units will only have a singular capacitor or won’t have a metal oxide varistor (MOV). This unit really goes the extra mile using 3 X-capacitor, 4 Y-capacitors and 2 ferrite coils, this is a very positive indicator of quality!

In the back of this picture we can see the heatsink for the APFC MOSFETs. Cougar chose these MOSFETs for their low impedance which helps increase the efficiency of the unit.

Here we can see the switching transistors which also have a very low resistance.

The main capacitor for filtering the APFC is a high-quality Nippon Chemi-Con capacitor rated at 105^oC. Solid caps are also used later on in filtering the output rails which increases the longevity of the unit.

This daughterboard controls the APFC and PWM.

On the secondary side of the transformer, we can see the rectification transistors for the 12V rail on a branded heatsink.

The 12V output is then partially converted into 5V and 3.3V as required using two of these DC to DC converter daughterboards.