Gadgetory

Corsairs Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you like click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing of the be quiet shadow rock - it's designed in Germany QC in Germany and I actually like has some heft to it in spite of the fact that this CPU cooler it's an air cooling heatsink is designed to be pretty compact so better compatibility especially with cases so that you're able to get lots of cooling so high density in a small area so the first thing we find when we open it up is of course mounting hardware nice solid heavy mounting hardware some people like things to be lightweight others like them to be heavy that's what I like nice heavy back plates nice solid steel hold downs anything else is just sort of terrible and you probably shouldn't use it to be perfectly honest alright so opening it up further we get a user's manual which is black and white and in a variety of different languages including Z German and then next up we've got this is actually kind of unique I haven't seen this before so the design of the box has little holes punched in it so it holds the top the caps from the heat pipes in place to keep the heatsink from shifting around during shipping this way they're able to avoid having a piece of foam on the top of the heatsink and they can just have one on the bottom making the packaging a little bit more environmentally friendly so once we open it up we find a pretty simple overall heatsink design so there are four eight millimeter heat pipes attached to an extremely shiny base so we'll do that obligatory finger shot right there where you guys can see it's basically a mirror to be clear a mirror finish is not necessary for heat transfer but it's obviously easier to achieve if the surface is flat and it's one of those things that some manufacturers throw in just for a debt bling bling the overall design of the pool or other than that remember guys a lot of the time for heat sinks it's more to do with the quality of the heat pipes then necessarily the the thickness of them or the configuration of them so the rest of the design of the heatsink is actually pretty straightforward it is a straight up box looks just like that with heat pipes that are positioned so that they're carrying heat the entire width so to get the best performance out of this heatsink please don't mount the fan on these sides because then a lot of the airflow that goes through it is going to be wasted so rather you want it if you wanted it in push-pull you go this way to this way unfortunately it doesn't include the clips you'd need to mount an additional fan out of the box but you could obviously jury-rigged something if you really wanted to the top has a brushed aluminum finish that's quite striking I would have preferred black personally but this is a nice finishing touch so the little texture on the top of the heat pipe cat pipe caps and the fact that they kept the heat pipes at all because normally heat pipes have kind of a finished end and an unfinished end and many manufacturers just leave both of those exposed the fan that's included is one of their silent wings fans so these are extremely well regarded fans out there I wouldn't have minded seeing some noise isolation rubber pieces in between the fan itself but honestly I'm not feeling inclined to take too many marks off for it because in terms of pricing it's a very reasonably positioned heat sink so if it doesn't have all the little extras and bells and whistles I guess we can let it go as long as they don't skimp on the stuff that's important like the backplate so I think without further ado I'm gonna hand this off to Slick where you can give you guys his subjective take on how easy or difficult it was to mount as well as performance numbers on our standardized heat sink test bench I'm going to compare this cooler to its closest competition the Noctua NH - u 14s it's bigger and slightly better performing which is fairly self-explanatory as you can see the graphs but the installation process was the biggest difference for me I actually had a lot of trouble with it and ended up calling Linus in and having him do it because I have much larger hands than he does and you don't get to use the long extended screwdriver method that you do with the knock - one you have to reach under the cooler and screw things in or use the wrench but the wrench was pretty much impossible to use for most angles because the motherboard we were using and my hands couldn't really fit under the cooler in any usable way so the installation process was pretty rough and I had to get outside help if I was a consumer and purchased this I would have had to get someone else to do it as well or I would have just had to return it I literally couldn't screw in I think it was the top left hand corner screw so that was actually kind of a problem but other than that it performs pretty well and it's not too big I fit fairly large size ram under it so that was pretty okay and that's about it if you liked the video like the video if you dislike the video dislike the video and in the comments below what are you going for are you going for a big cooler that cool is really really well are you going for that one that is kind of slim and look sleek and let's all of your RAM fit perfectly and as always subscribe to Linus tech tips