Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro CPU Cooler Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. The Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro Cooler4. Installing the Dark Rock Pro5. Testing Methodology and Performance6. Final Thoughts7. View All Pages

To test the Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro we used an Asus Crosshair V Formula motherboard combined with an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processor. For our overclocked results, the CPU was clocked to 4.01 GHz using a baseclock of 200MHz, a multiplier of 20x and a core voltage of 1.45V.

Test System

Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
Motherboard: Asus Crosshair V Formula
Memory: 4 GB (2x 2GB) Kingston HyperX Genesis DDR3 1600MHz
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-3
Graphics Card: HIS Radeon 5550 Silence
Chassis: Corsair Obsidian 650D

For our temperature tests we set of the both fans to maximum and loaded the system for 15 minutes using Prime 95. We then restarted the system and left it idling at the desktop for 15 minutes before recording temperatures. Room temperature was maintained at 22 degrees Celsius for the duration of the tests.

These temperatures are fairly good overall but we would recommend some caution at these settings as the load temperature is a little on the high side. There are various trains of thought on this, but we like to see no more than 55c load with increased voltage, long term.

In our noise level tests we switched off all the case fans so we are just taking into account the noise generated by the fans themselves.

With the fans on maximum, the cooler achieved a good result of 32.8 dBA in our noise level test which isn't a world away from the claimed noise level of 25.9 dBA. The noise level meter we used has a minimum sensitivity of 30 dBA so we were unable to record the noise level at minimum speed, as it was below the sensitivity of the equipment.

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