Man on the Street review:- be quiet! Dark Rock Pro CPU Cooler

[Gdubs]

Item description
be quiet! Dark Rock Pro CPU Cooler

Manufacturer and code
be Quiet!
BK016

Cost
£53.99 (Inc VAT@ 20%)

Supplier
SpecialTech






Overview
More widely known to date for their extensive range of Power supplies, be quiet! have entered the CPU cooling market with two tower type units. Continuing the "Dark" theme of their Product line up over from the PSUs we have the Dark Rock Advanced and the Dark Rock Pro. The unit reviewed today is the Pro version and is the larger of the two coolers.

The Pro is a twin fan twin tower type CPU cooler. The fans are mounted on the front and between the two towers respectively. The unit is finished in a combination of black brushed aluminium and dark Nickel. Connection is via 2 PWM fan connectors with an adapter to allow insertion of both cables into a single Motherboard header. The Pro comes complete with a wide selection of mounting brackets and a small syringe of TIM.





Technical specification
Overall dimensions (L x W x H) (mm) 133 x 150 x 166
Total weight 1550
Socket compatibility LGA 775 / 1155 / 1156 / 1366,
AM2 / AM2+ / AM3 / 754 / 939 / 940
Fan model, number Silent Wings PWM , 2
Anti vibration fan fixing ✓
Overall noise level (dB(A)) @ 900/1250/100% (rpm) 12.0 / .8 / 25.9
Fin dimensions (L x W) , thick (mm) 133 x 47 x 0,4
Number of fins 44
Fin material Aluminium
Base material Copper
CPU contact surface CNC machined
Heatpipe number, Diameter (mm) 7; 6
Surface treatment Nickel plated

Fan dimensions (mm) 120
Speed @ 100% PWM (rpm) 1700
Air flow @ 100% (CFM; m3/h) 57,2; 93,3
Air pressure (mm H2O) 2,1
Bearing type FDB
Rated voltage (V) 12,0
Input current (A) 0,2
Input power (W) 2,4
PWM Controller ✓
Cable length (mm) 250
Cable sleeve ✓
Livetime L10 @ 25 °C (hours) 300.000

Further specs and details available from the be quiet website

http://www.be-quiet.net/be-quiet.net...websiteLang=en


First impressions, description and quality.
Presented in an predominantly black box with technical style graphical illustrations of the Cooler depicted in white. The Pro comes fully assembled, with both of the included 120mm silent wing fans already attached.




Once opened and the contents revealed The immediate impact of the Dark Rock Pro is that of the sleek satin black brushed Aluminium top cover. The finish here is to a very high standard with the black theme being carried to the upper surfaces of the cooling fins themselves.







To give a bit of contrast the saw tooth edges of the fins have a dark and not overly shiny nickel plate finish. The attached fans are be quiets! own Silent wings. These are also finished in Black with an usual ridged appearance to the fan blades. The 7 heat pipes are also dark Nickel plated giving the whole assemble a very stealthy and Neutral appearance.








The Dark Rock Pro is quite a large cooler, but then it's going to be offering twin 120mm fans as it does. The pro measures 133mm x 150mm x 166mm (L,W,H). As with most large coolers there may be clearance issues with RAM sporting large Heatsinks.


Instructions.
The Dark Rock Pro comes with very well written and annotated Multi Language instructions (EN, DE, FR, ES and PL). Once unfolded the instructions cover the equivalent of 4 sides of A4 and cover the mounting method for pretty much all Intel and AMD sockets. A full technical specification and warranty details are also included.




Fitting
Fitting system is very similar if not identical to the Scythe system which could perhaps indicate that this cooler comes from the same OEM. It has to be said that this mounting method can be a bit fiddly at best and a right royal pain in the bum at worst. In essence it requires a screw through from the rear of the Motherboard which necessitates holding the cooler in place with one hand while screwing through from the other.

There is an easier way to mount this style of cooler though. Even if you have a motherboard tray with an access hole it's actually considerably easier to mount this style of fitting by removing the motherboard and inverting both the cooler and the mother board, resting the supported motherboard upside down on the cooler. This makes fitting somewhat less testing as the holes in the mounting brackets can be more easily seen from the reverse side. It also goes some way to reducing the degree to which the heatsink contact plate slides around on the layer of TIM. Why is that important? Well if your contact plate has been slipping around like a granny on ice skates then how sure can you be that the TIM is where you want it?

So OK the mount could be better, and it has been quite fairly slated by others. But it's not a show stopper. I've heard it referred to as a 2 man job, but it's not provided you take your motherboard out, and let's face it if you're installing a cooler there's a fair chance you're doing a system build or at least upgrading other components along the way so it's no real biggy to whip the mobo out.
Let's be honest, how many times are you really going to be taking your cooler off once you've fitted it? Chances are the next time it comes off is the next time you buy a new cooler right?

Once fitted the fans attach to the motherboard via a PWM adapter allowing both to be plugged into and thus controlled by the same PWM socket on the Motherboard. the 120mm mid section and front fans are very securely fastened to the heatsink via metal spring clips and each of the attached Silent wings fans have a rubber gasket attached to it (think soft rubber blow hole trim) this gasket is intended to minimise the transmission of vibration and resonant noise between the fans and the fins of the heatsink, and it does seem to work.

Coming back to the size of the Pro, it's quite tall at 166mm and where this shouldn't cause a problem with most cases on the market, it may cause issues in cases with a side panel case fan located high up on the side of the panel.





Aesthetics
Always a subjective opinion is aesthetics. That said, I think we'd be hard pushed to find anyone who would say it was ugly. Personally I find machined billet of black brushed aluminium that tops the cooler appeals to the part of me that would love to have been a design engineer or a machinist. The black "stealth" theme is carried throughout the cooler with just a hint of Dark Nickel adding to the feel of quality and class. This is one of the first coolers I've looked at and not felt the urge to change in some way. Even the simple black silent wings fans look good with their rounded cowling. What is it that possess CPU cooler manufacturers to mount fans that look like they're made out of the same colour plastic as they make artificial limbs, ( I'm looking at you Noctua and Thermalright).







Performance.

Test system
Intel core i7 920
Asus P6T Deluxe v2
6GB Corsair Dominator 1866 RAM

Performance was assessed with regards to cooling ability and noise.

I'm going to deal with noise first.
The manufacturers website give figures of 25.9 dB(A) at max rpm of 1700rpm. Pretty quiet to be honest, even at full tat, but then if the PWM control has it at max RPM, odds are you're busy gaming and are unlikely to hear the fans over the gunfire/engine noise/sword slashes, (delete as appropriate). What matters is how loud it is when idling. Well at 900 RPM the Pro emits a barely audible 12dB(A). Ahh the dB(A) what a wondrous measure it is, we all use it but we don't really know what it means? Allow me to re cap

"The decibel (dB) is a logarithmic unit that indicates the ratio of a physical quantity (usually power or intensity) relative to a specified or implied reference level. A ratio in decibels is ten times the logarithm to base 10 of the ratio of two power quantities. Being a ratio of two measurements of a physical quantity in the same units".

Simple really! Actually it's not as bad as it looks. What all this mumbo jumbo means is that if you add 10dB you effectively double the perceived noise. So a 20dB fan is twice as loud as a 10dB fan and a 30db fan is 4 times louder than a 10dB fan.

So the Silent wing fans romp home at 12dB(A) at idle. Still none the wiser are we? In real world terms, 12dB(A) isn't silent, but it's not too far off, and is probably a smidge below the ambient system/room noise. So basically you aren't really going to hear it.


And so on to thermal performance.
If you've read any of my previous reviews you'll already know that I'm not a great fan of reams and reams of data, tables and graphs. Don't get me wrong, I actually have a bit of a soft spot for stats. As an ordinary bloke I do my reviews from the viewpoint of the man in the street, what the Americans would call "the average Joe". So whatever is reviewed I try to answer the questions that I myself would want answering.

And what do I want to know? I want to know what's best this thing will do. And if it's a cooler, as is the case here, the big question is when I push my overclock, what will the max temps be.

Well I pushed and here's what I found out.
The system above will run very nicely at 4.2 with 1.35volts so I tend to use this a benchmark for my temps.
Taking into account an ambient room temperature of 20.3 degrees and with 1 hour of tortuous Prime 95 the Dark Rock Pro was able to maintain an average temp across 4 cores of 78.7. This equates to a Delta T of 58.4 degrees. I have to be honest, I'm pretty impressed with that.

Conclusion.
A great looking cooler with more than acceptable performance. Where others might best it slightly on thermal performance it pounds them into the ground on aesthetics.







Good points.
Oh those looks!
Low noise level at idle
Reasonably low noise under load
Pretty good Thermal performance.

Bad points.
The fitting system
The fitting system (yes I know I mentioned it twice)


How could the product be improved?
Well if you don't know by now you haven't read the review have you? oh go on then, The fitting system could be better.


Would I want to spend more to make it better?
Actually no, the fitting system is a pain, but I wouldn't want to pay more for a better method.

[Zayras]

Nice review. Any chance you could swap out the fans and write a little on the thermal and noise performance with different fans? Commander_HK47 and [XC] Synthetickiller wanted to know in this thread. I'd like to know as well

[Vivi]

I don't see any temp tests :<

i see you wrote something there about temp tho. But show it to us

pics are nice though

[K404]

Nice review, been curious about these coolers for a while

For future, please can you give us a comparison point, even if it's just the stock cooler?

And... like Vivi said, everyone likes to see big clear obvious numbers for results



Thanks for posting!

[Dark Mantis]

Thanks for an interesting review and while diagrams and pictures of the temps would be nice I didn't feel they were missing from the review.

[[XC] Synthetickiller]

Nice review. Any chance you could swap out the fans and write a little on the thermal and noise performance with different fans? Commander_HK47 and [XC] Synthetickiller wanted to know in this thread. I'd like to know as well

I actually got mentioned in another thread. I feel like an X.I.P.!

Yeah, the astetics of this cooler amaze me. Just looks so much more sleek than the D14 / Silver Arrow. Sadly, it can't touch either in performance.

The link to the site in the OP's review is the cheapest I've seen; $97 shipped to my door. Much better than $125, but still painful, all the same.

I may, even as soon as next month pick this up. I won't have a chance to test it on anything good (xeon e3 1270 which only OC's with BCLK), but I'd love to know how it stacks up to a 120mm noctua. I think jab-tech had the prolimatech armageddon for $35, but its OOS. I wanted to see how the 3 compared as they are not common sinks people get (usually if you're going NH-U12P, might as well go D-14 for the price).

Like I said before, I have 2 noctua fans, like 3 or 4 spare GT 1850s, one or two antec tri-cool fans and some silverstone along with other brands just lying around. Would make for an intersting comparison, even on a stock 80w quad w/ HT.



@ the OP

Gdubs, you're across the pond or you're an American? Just wondering if you payed about $100 w/ shipping? Americans just don't have this cooler.

[PatRaceTin]

it look great!!!

but i never seen this cooler

[[XC] Synthetickiller]

This is one of those "hard to get items" (at least for me) that seems to be worth the cost of having it for the bling factor.

The shipping to the US is a killer though. Bulk ordering is the only way to go to offset 20 pound shipping for individual orders. Even reshipping after being in the US is a lot cheaper. There just doesn't seem to be enough people interested to do that.

[Etihtsarom]

^ yep. And at this price after all is said and done, ya might as well go to newegg and get the silverarrow or whatever the best performing one out there is.

[[XC] Synthetickiller]

I do think that astetically, Be Quiet! got this cooler right. The caps and black brushed aluminium look amazing. Much better than pinched off pipes at the end like other coolers.

But you are right Silver Arrow beats this sink hands down, although it doesn't look as classy.