CPU Air Cooler Mega Test

bequiet Dark Rock3

Price:  £51.17

Technical Specification 

 

Up Close

We thought we’d pop in a shot of the instructions.  now don’t go enlarging that image, what you see before you is pretty much the size of the actual diagrams you have at your disposal.  They are, needless to says pretty much useless. 

       

 

The cooler itself is elegant in the extreme, you really do have to admit that bequiet make a damn fine looking cooler.  At 160mm tall case compatibility is good, and with a 135mm fan it should be a decent performer.

       

 

The heat pipes are Dark Nickel coated and run up through the 51 element “wave contour” fin stack.  The pipes are split into two rows on each side, with one slightly more medial than the other.

       

 

The top of the cooler is adorned with a stepped black brushed Aluminium cover plate, with gloss black caps for the heat pie ends.  Underneath, the 6x6mm dark Nickel coated heat pipes are a thing of beauty, with no evidence of solder splatter, it’s all very clean and high quality down here.

       

 

Having learnt our lessons with the Rock2, fitting the Rock3 was a lot easier.  That said, even with the knowledge of how to do it correctly, the instructions still aren’t wonderfully clear.  Unfortunately, considering this is a hefty 140mm fan based cooler with 6x6mm heat pipes it totally fails to perform.  Not quite bottom of the charts, but nowhere near where it should be when you add up the ingredients.  Again we think this lackluster performance is a product of the large fin stack coupled with a quiet low speed fan that just can’t push enough air through. The fan is very quiet but then all of the other brands can easily have the fan slowed down, the bequiet combination is good to look at and quiet if thats what you are after but we cant help feeling like its over priced.