bequiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 Heatsink Review

We have noticed two key elements when it comes to designing a silent heatsink.  The first is surface area and in most cases this will dictate the size of a heatsink and how much heat it can handle.  The second is a complement of the first and consists of a well designed cooling fan to match the heatsink capacity and help facilitate the heat transfer.

The interesting thing about the Dark Rock Pro 3 is that it expands on the previous statement by adding more heatpipes and splitting the surface area across two distinct radiators with fans on each.  Despite the additional fan the cooler is silent heatsink having been nearly inaudible even under full load.  As you can imagine noise is often a factor of the cooling fan, the more air you move the noisier it can be.  If you reduce the total airflow then the chance of excess noise is also reduced.  Sadly this aspect of the Dark Rock Pro 3 is also our biggest complaint.  On one hand we have a massive seven heatpipe cooler that is rated to handle 250 watts but tends to react slowly due to the silent fans and thicker radiator material. 

Of course our biggest complaint is also the biggest strength.  Without the extra mass and seven heatpipe design the Dark Rock Pro 3 wouldn't be able to handle overclocking like it did with our Core i7 LGA 2011.  The C/W numbers we recorded should translate quite well to any LGA 115x based system with similar heat loads.

Installation on LGA 2011 was rather straight forward and consisted of picking the proper mounting rails and bolting everything together.  The actual installation process was somewhat cumbersome given that the space between the radiator and motherboard is quite small.  For our tests we needed to remove everything from the motherboard just to access the locking nuts and then were tasked with slowly tightening each nut until snug.  The method is very simple, mechanical and borderline "cheap" but, works.

Dual Tower Design
Silent Wings Cooling Fan(s)
Seven Heatpipe Design
Thick Fin Radiator
Decorative Radiator Cover
Dark Nickel Plating
250w Power Handling

Mounting system is cumbersome