Final Thoughts
be quiet! continues their line of Dark Rock CPU coolers with the Dark Rock Pro 3, and with style too. They always do a great job of making sure their coolers are going to look good inside of your case. These is very evident by the color and brushed aluminum top of the cooler itself. be quiet! is the only company that does this on their air coolers. So if you have a side panel window you can definitely show this cooler off.
Besides looks this cooler has great performance. It sits about in the middle of all of the air coolers that we have tested. There was only 23.5 degrees between the idle and load temperatures, normally we see that number around 30 degrees. Another thing to mention was how quiet the two fans were. During idle you could barely hear them at all and during load they were just audible. I do think that if be quiet! had included more high performance fans this cooler would have been able to match Noctua’s offerings that we have tested.
While performance is one of the biggest factors in choosing a CPU cooler, install is also very important. No one wants to take a long time having to install a cooler. Well with the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 it is going to take some time. Because the cooler is so large you are going to have to remove your motherboard from the case and more likely than not have to remove your memory as well. Then you have to carefully get the nuts on and tighten them, slowly with the included wrench. This is one of the more complicated and sort of annoying installations that we have encountered in a while. be quiet! definitely needs to rethink this aspect of their coolers.
At the end of the day this still is a great cooler if you can get past the more difficult installation. I would have liked to see a little better performance too since this is such a large cooler. The Dark Rock Pro 3 is selling at my favorite online retailer for $89, which is a bit steep for an air cooler. Overall ThinkComputers gives the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 a 7 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Sleek design
– Very quiet
– Good performance
Cons:
– Difficult installation
– Price
