CPU Air Cooler Mega Test

be quiet Dark Rock Pro3

Price:  £61.98

Technical Specification

 

Up Close

Remember the top of the range Cryorig R1?  Remember how nicely presented and organised the accessories were?  Now have a shufty at the way be quiet present things to you.  Essentially everything has just been stuffed into a cardboard box, which is even too small for the instructions to fit in neatly without getting crumpled up.

       

 

The cooler itself though is a thing of beauty, we’ve long been admirers of the dark sultry looks and imposing presence that is the Pro3.  And we’re hopeful that it’s twin stack layout and combination of high speed 120mm and lower speed 135mm fans will garner some decent performance results.

       

 

The 7x6mm heat pipes are spread evenly between the twin towers allowing for maximum heat transfer into the stacks, with the front 120mm fan covering the whole of the front of the first stack, and the larger 135mm fan dropping down lower and providing air to the rear stack.

       

 

The top of the Pro3 is finished in a thick stepped Aluminium billet bearing the bequiet logo in chrome.  Underneath, it’s nice to some quality work on the heat pipes, contact plate and fin stack.

       

 

So how does it perform?  Well as you might guess if you’ve read the other bequiet reviews, not very well at all.  It manages to come in slightly on the right side of the half way mark in the 4,7GHz test, which although not bad is astonishingly bad for a twin stack cooler of this size.  Look at the cooler that’s immediately ahead of it in the test…Yes that’s right, the 92mm fan based Noctua NH-U9S outperforms the twin stack twin fan based Pro3.  On the plus side, we do have to be honest and say that we really love the look of the Pro3, it just has such fantastic case presence.  We think it’s a real shame that the bequiet coolers don’t perform as expected, and although we can’t be sure our hunch is that the lacklustre performance is related to two factors.  he first of these is that feel the quiet fan technology isn’t up to the job of pushing the air through the large finstack sufficiently even if it is quiet anyone can make a fan that doesnt push any air and just rave about its silence.  The second is that even with everything tightened down as far as it will go the contact plate doesn’t have a firm enough contact with the CPU lid and that is despite fitting it correctly and making sure it was as tight as everything could go. All fittings were done up to the stoppers where the thread runs out, short of adding in our own spacers there was no way to get this mounted any tighter.  A form of compression spring as seen with many other coolers may well help, and it’s a development we’d love to see.