Be quiet!'s Dark Rock series is back and better than ever.
Howdy howdy guys ponchato here, and today we're taking a look at the be quiet!
Dark Rock 4 CPU cooler.
Thanks to be quiet! for sending this over for review, and let's get to it.
Released very recently in April of 2018 for a $75 USD MSRP, the Dark Rock 4 is compatible
with AM4, LGA 1151, and LGA 2066.
It comes in at 159mm tall, 136mm wide, and 96mm deep – putting it well into the full
size tower cooler category.
The included fan is a be quiet!
Silent Wings 3 which is a somewhat oddly-sized fan at 135mm.
It's rated for up to 1400 RPM and comes with a proper fluid dynamic bearing.
Thanks to its bulky dimensions, the Dark Rock 4 has room for six 6mm heat pipes (2 more
than many cheaper tower coolers), and it includes a second set of fan clips for a push/pull
configuration – although you will have to use a Silent Wings 3 since the clips are designed
specifically for that fan, with the mounting holes centered between the front and back
faces.
Be quiet! rates the Dark Rock 4 for a 200W TDP which should cover basically every consumer
CPU available today.
The outside of the box follows be quiet!'s philosophy of no nonsense, straight to the
point.
They even put the TDP right on the front – a lot of companies don't list TDP at all,
so I appreciate that.
On the sides you have some marketing speak and on the back, as is standard, the dimensions,
specifications, and what's included in the box.
Inside the box you'll find the Silent Wings fan right at the top, and you can see its
kinda weird centered-mounting-holes situation here.
Underneath is a box with two sections: one for the manuals, and one for all the mounting
bracket components.
I appreciate be quiet!'s commitment to ease of use here in providing the manual in six
different languages, but the tree hugger side of me was pained to see that much paper used.
Dead trees aside, the manual is, much like the rest of be quiet's work, straight to
the point and easy to follow.
I especially like the pictures with components highlighted – this is super helpful for
people who are new to PC building, and clearing up confusion if you don't understand any
part of the instructions.
For veterans though, the instructions are barely necessary: screw the mounting brackets
to the back plate, put the cooler on the CPU, then screw the cross bar to the mounting brackets.
On the other side are all the mounting brackets.
The two sets of fan mounting wires are on top and underneath you have the bag of motherboard
mounting hardware.
Be quiet! did this right by separating the Intel and AMD brackets into clearly labeled
bags – no confusion over which piece you're supposed to use.
The cooler itself is housed between two foam pads.
One of the protective foam halves holds a long screwdriver with a magnetic Phillips
head.
Big props to be quiet! for including all the tools you'll need for installation, I'm
not aware of anyone else who does this.
The cooler itself is hefty but not outrageously big or heavy, and has a really nice brushed
panel on the top with be quiet!'s logo.
No RGB, no LEDs, just straight black all over.
The base of the heat sink is a near-mirror finish and the Dark Rock 4 does not utilize
direct contact heat pipes, a trend we're seeing more and more often.
The front of the heat sink isn't perfectly flat, but rather indented and wavy.
The back side is likewise not just a flat surface, with a more squared off design cut
into the fins.
The fins themselves are dimpled through most of the center, which helps to induce turbulence
between the fins and increase cooling effectiveness.
In keeping with their company name, be quiet! put two rubberized strips on the front of
the heat sink to physically isolate the fan, preventing vibration from inducing noise in
the fins or chassis.
One thing be quiet! focused on with the Dark Rock 4 was ease of installation.
The Dark Rock 3 was unintuitive and difficult to install, people complained, and be quiet!
made sure that wasn't the case with the Dark Rock 4.
Indeed, installation on an AM4 motherboard was very fast and easy.
Using the stock backplate, you put four spacers onto the backplate's mounting holes.
Two bars go on either side of the socket and get screwed down to the backplate, with the
spacers between the bars and the motherboard.
Add a dab of the included thermal paste to the CPU, remember to peel off the plastic
cover on the base of the heat sink, and set it down on the processor.
A metal cross bar goes between the base of the heat sink and the fins to secure the heat
sink to the motherboard.
Two more screws clamp down the cross bar to the mounting bracket, and it's installed.
Fan installation is like most other tower coolers; line the fan up with the front and
pop the wire brackets into place.
With the fan vertically centered on the heat sink, the bottom of the fan's chassis rests
on the top of this standard-height RAM, however you do have a bit of leeway in how high to
mount the fan.
You could probably get another 5 or 8mm of RAM clearance by mounting the fan higher on
the heat sink, but the top of the fan would then extend past the top of the heat sink
so case clearance could become an issue if you have a smaller case.
Personally I like to see the front fan completely behind the RAM slots so clearance isn't
an issue, but this was a necessary sacrifice to allow a push/pull configuration and have
such a thick heat sink.
With the Dark Rock 4 installed it was time to start testing.
My test bench is a Ryzen 3 1200 overclocked to 4.1GHz at 1.35V on an MSI B350M Gaming
PRO motherboard with 8GB of DDR4-2400 memory.
The graphics card is a passively cooled GT 1030 from MSI, and thanks to Seasonic for
providing the power supply: an 850W Focus Plus Gold which can run passive under low
load.
Because the GT 1030 and Seasonic 850FX run passive cooling and don't produce noise,
the only sound coming from this system is from the CPU cooler itself.
Load temperatures are taken with the CPU running a Prime95 stress test, temperatures are allowed
to stabilize for 15 minutes before being recorded, and temps are reported as deltas; degrees
above ambient.
First we'll look at the idle results.
These are the noise levels and temperature deltas with no programs running and the fans
running at minimum RPM.
Because the Silent Wings 3 fan included with the Dark Rock 4 can completely stop turning
at 0% speed, it wins in terms of noise output; you can't really beat silent.
Also owing to that ability to completely stop the fan, the temperature delta is much higher
than even the stock cooler.
Realistically though, the temperature delta at idle is a non-issue, since the CPU isn't
under any kind of load.
Now we'll look at the max cooling results.
These measurements are taken under load with the fans at 100% to show the upper limit of
cooling.
The Dark Rock 4 is a very strong contender here – half a degree cooler than the Gammaxx
400 while running 4 decibels quieter.
No small feat to outperform a similarly sized cooler by that big of a margin.
Next we'll take a look at the RPM vs PWM graph to show the granularity of control you
can achieve with the fan.
The Dark Rock 4 is nearly perfect in this regard – the ideal result is a perfectly
straight line starting at 0 RPM and ending at whatever the fan's max speed is, and
this gets just about as close as you can with real-world components.
Now here's the Delta C vs RPM graph to show whether the cooler is limited by airflow or
by heat transfer.
A leveling off at higher RPM indicates the cooler is limited by heat transfer, while
a consistent drop in delta indicates airflow is the limiting factor.
In most cases, tower coolers and liquid AIOs are limited by heat transfer while top-down
coolers are limited by airflow.
From the looks of this, though, the Dark Rock 4 actually could drop another degree or two
if the fan allowed a higher RPM.
That would come at the cost of much higher noise at that higher RPM, but it would be
nice to give people that option if they don't care about the extra noise.
Now here is the most important graph for performance: temperature delta vs noise.
This answers the fundamental question, which is "how loud is it, and how well does it
cool?"
The Dark Rock 4 leads in two areas: first, at the minimum speed I was able to run for
load temperatures not to exceed 85 degrees (which was 20%, by the way) it was quieter
than any other cooler I've tested, well below the lower limit of my sound meter.
Second, it outperformed the other tower coolers in cooling performance by several degrees
at its maximum speed.
Simply put, this is the best tower cooler I've tested for idle noise and the best
tower cooler I've tested for load deltas.
Now here's the chart of cooler scores, which are essentially how close the cooler gets
to a hypothetical perfect cooler with a 0 degree delta and 0dB of noise.
You can think of this as a metric to compare coolers running at their optimal speed, balanced
between cooling performance and noise level.
Based on this metric, the Dark Rock 4 is very similar to both the Gammaxx 400, another tower
cooler, and the A40 Ultimate, a liquid AIO cooler.
Theoretically this score could go to 100 but I think 51 or 52 may be the actual, physical
upper limit, and these coolers are very close.
Finally, cooler score per dollar to show price to performance.
The Dark Rock 4 at around $75, isn't a champion here.
That is the cost of higher performance and more feature-rich coolers, though; the inescapable
concept of diminishing returns.
But, as is usually the case, a cooler like this probably won't be going into a budget
build, and absolute performance is more important than price to performance for higher end computers.
Now for the pros and cons.
First up, the pros.
Be quiet! lives up to its name; the Dark Rock 4 is indeed extremely quiet.
In fact, during testing in my nearly-silent room, I couldn't hear the Dark Rock 4 at
all until it was running at 60% speed.
Second, I love that you can completely stop the fan at idle.
Fans included with most coolers only drop to 6 or 800 RPM at 0%, but this one can fully
stop.
For those of you with your computer on your desk, right next to your head, this will be
a major selling point.
Third, the instructions were clear and installation was really easy.
Lots of people complained about installation of the Dark Rock 3, be quiet! listened, and
they fixed it.
As for the cons, there aren't any deal breakers but there are some things you should be aware
of.
First is RAM clearance if yours has tall heat sinks.
It comes with the territory of plus-size coolers like this one; you might have to set the fan
higher the heat sink for your RAM to fit in the first slot.
Second, and I'm sure this was by design because of be quiet!'s target audience,
I wish the fan could ramp up to 1600 or 1800 RPM to get a bit more cooling performance
on the top end.
Maybe that's not so much a con as it is extra performance left on the table.
All in all, the Dark Rock 4 lived up to my expectations and then some.
Being able to run the fan at 0RPM means it beats out almost every other tower cooler
in idle noise, the six heat pipes and oversized 135mm fan outperform other tower coolers under
load, and there wasn't any point during installation where I thought to myself "eh,
they could've done that better".
If I were to summarize it all in one sentence, I'd say the engineers and designers at be
quiet! made a really great cooler, and I can highly recommend the Dark Rock 4.
If you want to pick one up for yourself, click the link in the description.
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and if you have any questions on the Dark Rock 4, leave them in the comments below.
Thanks for watching, I hope I helped, and I'll see you in the next video.
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