bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review

bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review

Fitting

I’s fair to say that fitting large tower CPU coolers can feel a little like rogering yourself with a cactus.  It doesn’t matter how careful you are, how much time you take to ease things into place and how carefully you read the instructions, it’s still a massive pain in the anus.  Granted anally insertable cacti don’t usually come with instructions, or for that matter a box of accessories but I was on a bit of a role with the analogy and I wasn’t going to let a simple matter like that stop me.

bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review     bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review

 

Putting the cactus analogies aside for now, the first step is to attach the appropriate mounting brackets for either Intel (everything since 775), or AMD, (everything since the dawn of time).  So far so good, but the real fun has yet to begin.

bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review     bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review

 

Still feeling quite relaxed, this is where you attach the mounting pins to your motherboard or through to the universal back plate if you’re using one.  Thus far we haven’t felt the need to remove the motherboard but all that could change.

bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review     bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review

 

Remembering to add a dolopette of your chosen TIM the cooler drops in place atop the mounting pins.  Actually there’s a bit more to it than that if we’re honest, we had o remove the GPU, the RAM, the top of the case and the front fan from the cooler to allow access.  But hey, the Motherboard is still in. 

bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review     bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review  

 

All in all it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be, ok so we had to remove a fair bit of hardware but that’s pretty much a universal process if you’re fitting a large tower cooler so we can’t lambast bequiet for that.  The little spanner they provide for doing up the retaining bolts came in handy although it could do with being a little more robust, and as there are no tensioning springs to guide we simply followed bequiet’s instructions to “do them up tight but be careful”

bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review     bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review

 

It takes a big cooler to fill the inside of the Cooler Master “Test Trooper” and the bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 is certainly a big cooler.  We think it looks perfectly proportioned in there having almost forgotten just how much of a case presence a decent looking tower cooler can have.  No LED fans or glowing badges here, just a big chunk of hairline brushed black Aluminium visible through the case window.      

bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review     bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 Review Â