Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus Donette and today we are looking at be quiet dark rock pro 3 and this cooler was shipped to us by be quiet the german-based cpu cooler and power supply company they wanted us to look at it it is the most monolithic imposing cooler for a CPU that I have ever seen it is it is quite the masterpiece here a true work of art that perhaps Batman himself would install on his CPU and this color will run through the specs first and then look at the benchmark performance it is about $110 106 210 pretty damn expensive but it is a high-end air cooler which we often say will outperform low and liquid coolers so this is a a test of that statement the cooler is compatible with effectively all Intel CPUs from 775 sockets onward up to 2011 and it is compatible with AMD from way back to 750 for all the way up to FM 2 plus so it will work on basically everything the unit ships with two fans one is internal in between a dual aluminum tower cooling rig and the internal fan is 135 millimeters and the external fan is 120 millimeters that is the one that pushes that that pulls the air into the unit and then the middle fan pushes it out the back so that's our fan setup they are connected Foley with PWM and actually will connect to each other through a daisy chain so that you can only use one CPU cooler slot on the board which is a nice consideration by be quiet the unit is rated for 13.2 decibels at 50% of the RPM and it goes up to 20 6.1 decibels at 100% rpm and the RPM range is 1400 to 1,700 for both fans they use a fluid dynamic bearing meaning that it is rated for a higher lifespan it will get a bit Y near when when you first use the unit but that whine dies down pretty quickly as the bearings are burned in in their first cycle the lifespan is rated at 300,000 hours at 25 Celsius that you're going to get a little bit of degradation with the heat consideration but that's that it's still pretty pretty high all of that noted we can then look at the actual aluminum and copper components the cold plate of the CPU cooler is a mirror finish it's very shiny in fact scarily shiny because you will see yourself in the mirror and that is made out of a copper base plate this is connected to seven heat pipes at six millimeters in diameter making this cooler the largest cooler we've ever tested on the bench and seven heat pipes is a damn lot of heat pipes now you might be wondering why they don't do fewer heat pipes at eight millimeters versus more at six having more heat pipes like this will actually give the unit a better performance potential with larger CPUs like the 2011 socket that take up a physically larger square area you do lose some of that performance when testing with things like the 1150 and 1155 series like we have done here because the CPU won't won't fully saturate that cold plate the cooler is physically very large this is 150 by 137 by 163 millimeters which means it will have limited compatibility on smaller cases as a lot of these smaller cases are limited to 160 millimeter height of coolers looking at installation before benchmarks installation on this unit is one of the most painful processes I've ever had the misfortune of running into with a CPU cooler in fact it the instructions aren't 100% clear what you should do if you buy this is separately prepare the CPU cooler before placing it onto the board what I mean by this is you mount your backplate to the motherboard you snap the screws into place with these plastic snaps that are included so they won't slip out and then you mount the rest of the components to the cooler and then you mount your motherboard to the CPU cooler that sounds a bit backwards but it's the best way to do it in this instance and you can see it in the video I'm showing here so that's sort of the best way to go about this if you don't do it this way and you try to mount the CPU cooler and then screw on the nut that holds the bolts into place you are going to be one busting your knuckles on copper and he's spending an hour doing it and probably will have a somewhat bent board at the end because it's very difficult to properly adjust the corner screw because of the heatsink placement on the motherboard for the erm heatsinks so do keep that in mind not so bad if you do it the way I explained you should probably do it with the board hanging over a table or something like that to make your life a bit easier or get a hand model with small hands to do everything for you because those are abundant as we all know looking at the benchmark results all the test methodology is in the article linked in the description below please click on that and read through the article for more details on this it and and also to see the test methodology so stock performance this cooler just kind of jumping straight into it hands down takes the first place best of bench award for air coolers on our bench it is beaten out strictly by closed-loop liquid coolers including the likes of the ex 40 on extreme settings it actually beats the ex 40 on silent and the ex 60 on silent extreme the H 9 th 110 and an Tex 1250 which is on the next chart that I'll be showing the be quiet dark rock pro 3 is a forty nine Celsius stable temperature ranking just above our previous best of bench silverstone are gone ar zero one with two fans at forty nine point two or one fan at fifty point six Celsius using the aftermarket compound which is much better in my opinion the controlled compound produces a forty nine point nine seven Celsius load temperature which means it is just slightly above the argon AR 0 one again and blow antics 1250 on silent settings two things to note here one the compound that ships with the dark rock pro three is very runny it's kind of liquidy and because of the very painful installation process that means it's going to get all over the place where you don't want it when you're installing the unit and it's not gonna be a perfect install I actually had to do this three times to make sure I had the the thermal paste the way I liked it I would recommend getting something like what I use for control which is an antic silver something or other or Arctic silver is also very good because those are going to be more solid and they'll stay in place better second things note this unit is very expensive it's $110 that places it at the same price actually more than an TX 1250 which is our current best of bench for everything in terms of CPU coolers and it places it a little bit under the new NZXT ex 61 and a little under the XTX 60 and just above the X 40 so why then would you want to buy be quiet Stark Rock pro three well it's it's really three things it's for silence it's for aesthetics and it's for endurance in terms of silence I don't have an objective decibel test for you unfortunately but subjectively it is quieter than all the other air coolers on the bench and it is quieter than all of the liquid coolers when they are on extreme settings and some of them when they're on custom settings the dark rack pro 3 is about tied with the Antec 1250 on silent and x 14 x 60 on silent but it's going to be quieter than the Corsair h 110 and h 90 for sure by actually a longshot beyond that the aesthetics you're paying for a very cool look it's a big cooler and it looks good in the case so if you have a custom build you're doing that demand something like this with similar performance to see LCS and you really don't care about that extra one to three degrees Celsius you can get with a 1250 or an H 110 then this is your best bet because it's going to look better for your type of build and it performs fairly similarly and about the same level of silence when they are on their silent settings third you're buying this for endurance it has a 300 thousand our rating of life on the fans that is going to last a lot longer than most of these tubes will or the liquid on units like the H 100 I because it doesn't have to deal with evaporation or age over time and if you leave the system alone for a while it'll be fine too so if you want something longer-lasting and that requires less maintenance in a couple of years then this is a good bet now in terms of value you really should be buying an argon ar0 one if you're trying to build on more of a budget it's $35 so that is one third of the price and it performs effectively identically it is within margin of test error so you do the math you know if you want a cheaper build you get the AR 0 1 if you can handle slightly louder noise and you don't care for the cooler to last for your entire life it's still you're going to get a couple years out of it that's good enough for most people if you want liquid you can go with the 1250 for a hundred bucks you can go with an X 44 I don't know something like 80 to 90 I think X 61 for 140 so there are a lot of options out there flanking the DRP 3 in terms of liquid that is I have to say about this click on the link in the description below for full details and more of my opinions and I will see you all next time peace