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Back at CES, we saw a glimpse of the new Dark Rock Pro 4 and Dark Rock 4 air coolers by be quiet!. Ahead of their April launch, KitGuru was invited to the main design centre based in Hamburg to get a first look at what’s to come and the testing process behind it.
While be quiet! is primarily based in Germany, the company has labs dotted all around the world. A small production team is located in the mainland of China and a whopping 11 throughout Taipei. Hamburg houses the design centre, in which brand new products are created from scratch and rigorously tested.
The testing rig itself is the same one that the company uses in Taipei, with a single dummy heater for AMD and another for Intel. The cooler is mounted using the same mechanism as home PC builds, however the room is specially regulated to maintain a steady 22℃, whereas the inside of the chamber is raised to 35℃.
“The actual Testing takes around 10 minutes,” explains be quiet! guru, Martin Wechterowicz. “Five minutes to hit the right temperature and the next five minutes to confirm effectiveness.” Of course, this is for each individual test conducted. The full test usually takes around 4 hours including the set up and break down times.
In fact, this is a contributing factor to be quiet! continuing to ensure the mounting of its coolers is a smooth and efficient process. The engineers have boiled the mount times of older Dark stock coolers to under 5 minutes, however, the new mechanism on the Dark Rock Pro 4 and Dark Rock 4 are supposedly much quicker as fans are no longer pre-installed.
They will still ship with the company’s renown Silent Wings 3 fans, so customers won’t miss out on “lower noise and better performance,” which you can tell by its name is what it’s all about. The Dark Rock Pro 4 and Dark Rock 4 are built with that in mind, designed with improved heat pipes so as to compliment the effectiveness of the Silent Wings 3. Wechterowicz also assures us that the Pro 4 in particular allows for high profile memory with the cut outs to its design.
be quiet! has narrowed its release date from Q2 2018 to sometime in April this year, although the exact date is yet to be confirmed. The Dark Rock Pro 4 is expected to retail close to £59 in the UK, which seems like a great price for what’s offered.
KitGuru Says: Despite not believing in brand loyalty, be quiet! has proven itself time and time again to me. I’m currently representing its Dark Base 900 with a custom window, alongside its super quiet Silent Wings 3 fans and couldn’t be happier with the cooling and noise levels. Do you think you’ll invest in the company’s new Dark Rock Pro 4 or Dark Rock 4?
