Final Thoughts
As I said at the beginning of this review the Dark Rock Pro series from be quiet! is their top of the line series and they have definitely delivered on that! This cooler was very close to the top of the results in our load tests, which is very impressive considering all of the other large coolers we have in our test group. These include the latest coolers from Cooler Master, Noctua, and DeepCool. What was also very impressive was how quiet this cooler was, even during heavy load. The noise level results were better than most single-fan coolers out there.
On top of just good performance this cooler is quite easy to get installed. The easy to remove top cap and center fan are a big part of this. Be quiet! has moved away from fan clips for the center fan, which I think is a great move as fan clips can be a bit tricky, especially if you are installing a large cooler like this with your motherboard mounted inside the case. Talking about that I would say you can get this cooler installed with your motherboard mounted in a case no problem. It was also nice to have a built-in switch if you wanted to change the fan profile for more quiet operation, but as you saw from our results this cooler is very quiet.
I was a bit disappointed by our idle cooling results, although nothing to really worry about (considering the great load performance), this cooler was close to the bottom of our test group. Also this cooler does not have any lighting on it, which I think many people will appreciate, especially those doing the sort of black-out builds. If you do want some lighting you might want to check out the Dark Rock Elite. Stay tuned for our upcoming review of that cooler!
Right now you can pick this cooler up at our favorite online retailer for $84.90, which makes it about $15 cheaper than some of the other massive dual-tower, dual-fan, CPU cooler’s we’ve tested lately. Overall ThinkComputers gives the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5 CPU Cooler a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Great cooling performance
– Very quiet
– Easy installation
– Hardware switch for different fan profiles
– About $15 cheaper than other similar coolers
Cons:
– Completely covers your memory
– Idle performance could be better
