Idle is reasonable, and this was at 4.4Ghz, but the stability test pushed the temperature up to 95 C° which is very high. Despite this, no throttling was reported throughout.
The Dark Rock Pro 3 produced 42.3 Db at 95 C° which is good, single fan coolers would have started to scream at this point. With the BIOS set to PWM, there is room for improvement, we would have rather seen slightly higher Db and lower temperatures.
Conclusion
This is a big cooler with a big performance window and good sound performance figures. It looks awesome, is well made, produced by a big name, and if you have the chassis to fit it into, all the bragging rights you want. In an era of AIO Coolers and more custom watercooling components than you can shake a stick at, it can be easy to forget there is a mature, high performance air cooler out there. This is certainly one of them and you will have a lot of quiet gaming or overclocking fun with it, just remember to adjust the fan controls before you do.
Final Thoughts
Back in the day you needed to research your new rig so all the parts would fit together with no physical clash issues. These days there is so much out there you will pretty much get what you need and it will fit, well not anymore! Anything higher in height than low profile memory and you will have a clearance issue with the external fan, at least in out test X99 motherboard. The Dark Rock Pro 3 overhangs a lot, and after you have taken all the skin off your knuckles, you’ll want your RAM to fit.
We test fitted some Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 and there wasn’t an issue, we then tested some Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 which has a minimal heatsink sticking out of the top and it fouled the heatsink. The fan is height adjustable, but the heatsink is not, and on our Asus Rampage V Extreme, you couldn’t get the Corsair into the closest memory slot to the CPU. The Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 memory was fine, but there wasn’t much in it. With that said, if it fits, it will be a solid performer.
be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 CPU Cooler
Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 CPU Cooler Review
Package - 8.5
Performance - 9
Price - 8.5
Consumer Experience - 6.5
8.1
Back in the day you needed to research your new rig so all the parts would fit together with no physical clash issues. These days there is so much out there you will pretty much get what you need and it will fit, well not anymore! Anything higher in height than low profile memory and you will have a clearance issue with the external fan, at least in out test X99 motherboard.