Cougar Forza 85

The Cougar Forza 85 is a decent air cooler. It will provide everything you would expect from an air cooler. This air cooler performed better than other air coolers I have tested.

The Cougar Forza 85 is decent, if a bit overly priced, air cooler. In terms of pure performance with the fans at maximum RPM, it does fairly well as it manages to perform similarly to the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4, Noctua NH-U12A, and the DeepCool AK620 on our Intel test bench. However, the issue here is all those coolers are far quieter than the Cougar offering, which hit a max of 57 dBA. Once you limit all the coolers to the same noise level, the Forza 85 falls off sharply in terms of cooling capabilities. It is bad enough that many air coolers at 2/3 of the price deliver equal performance at the same 45 dBA. So while the Forza 85 can absolutely dominate them at higher fan speeds, users will have to accept greatly elevated noise levels to do so. On our AMD test system, things further fall apart. While once again it does decently well at max RPM, in the noise normalized tests, it is outperformed by other more affordable options. Suffice it to say for the Cougar Forza 85 to be truly competitive; it would need to be closer to the $55 price point than its nearly $70 current price.