httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5u86oGgVr4
What’s goin on guys, Jerry here and I’m back with another video. Today we’re taking a look at this MASSIVE CPU cooler. This is the Dark Rock Pro 3 by Be Quiet!.
This company specializes in silence optimized PC hardware. Think of them like the…all black Noctua basically…from Germany. They make things like power supplies, case fans, CPU coolers and pretty much all of them are silence optimized including this CPU cooler here. Now Be Quiet! was kind enough to send out a product for review so let’s take a look at it.
Starting with the exterior, this cooler measures 150x137x163mm which is definitely huge BUT surprisingly shorter than the Hyper 212 EVO so if you can fit one of those there’s a good chance you can run this as well, provided other things don’t get in the way like drive cages or RAM but more on that later. This a twin tower cooler with 7 heat pipes on each side helping dissipate heat from even the most power hungry CPUs as it supports any current AMD or Intel consumer CPU socket up to 250W TDP.
Now the main draw of this cooler is ‘no compromise silence and performance‘ so attached to each tower is a 120 and 135mm SilentWings PWM fan which BeQuiet! claims has a dBA of 26.1 at 100% fan speed.
Overall I’d say this a pretty high-end feeling piece of hardware. From the heat pipes, to the fins and dampening material between the fan and tower and especially the aluminum cover, although fingerprint prone, all screams high end.
BUT that all means nothing if it doesn’t perform. So I set out to install the cooler and everything went pretty straight forward, Be Quiet! provides all of the accessories and instructions that you’ll need for the install. And at least with an AMD CPU, attaching the cooler to the backplate was pretty simple. RAM clearance was also not an issue with the 4th RAM slot just barely clearing the heatpipes. Now I run G.Skill Ares RAM which is fairly low profile so if you run something taller than this you may or may not run into issues depending on the location of your RAM slots.
Now I’m not gonna lie, it did take some work to fit this into my tiny case. I had to re-locate my hard drive, remove the exhaust fan and temporarily move the power supply so I could re-install the exhaust fan, a bunch of little stuff but I finally got it in there so it was time to test the performance.
I fired up Prime95 and ran a torture test for 10min. on my AMD CPU and with the starting temp at 36C it rose to 48C under load. So overall I was able to see a performance improvement over my Hyper 212 EVO on both ends. Which I was expecting, considering the size and price point of this cooler. I’d love to compare it to an AIO cooler in its price range to see if its worth it to invest in a cooler like this or go with maybe a small 120mm AIO cooler.
On the noise end, I didn’t really feel like the cooler was very quiet at 100%. It wasn’t necessarily LOUD but the combination of vibration and fan speed made it a little noisy for my tastes…until I dropped the fan speed to around 1200RPM. It could be because I stuffed a giant cooler into a tiny little case but one or the other could use some more vibration dampening. The good thing with this cooler though is I can afford to drop the fan speed some without having to worry about the performance.
Anyway, that’s about it. Link is in the description if you wanna check one of these out for yourself. Thanks for watching and don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe…and until next time see ya!
Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 http://amzn.to/151uOal
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