Running the Dark Rock Pro 5 paired with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K. After nearly 10 years on AIOs—cycling through 3–4 units due to pump failures or leaks—I decided to switch back to air cooling, and I’m glad I did. This cooler outperforms my previous 240mm AIO in every way: lower temps, quieter operation, and far less hassle. With a minor undervolt, temps stay under 78°C during stress testing and idle around 38°C, evenly across all cores. Under normal use and gaming sessions, it doesn’t break 60°C. If a fan ever fails, it’s a quick swap—not a full teardown like with an AIO. Build quality is excellent, and it looks great in the case. Installation was smooth, and it fits perfectly on LGA1851. If you want reliable, top-tier air cooling with better thermals and long-term peace of mind, this is the one to get. Read more
This is a beefy CPU cooler coming in at 168mm tall. The installation process is easy and simple, a screwdriver is supplied in the box along with thermal paste. Mounting this on my Gigabyte B850M AORUS ELITE WIFI6E ICE was not an issue at all. The mounting kit is one of the best I have used. Once installed, it quiet and provides great airflow in my A3-case. The Dark Rock Pro 5 will fit into a Lian Li A3 case with no problems as seen in the pictures. Overall, I am very satisfied with the cooling and performace of the CPU cooler. I'm using it on a AMD 9800x3d CPU and it easily keeps it under 62C on average gaming. I don't rely on stress test because they do not represent real word usage. When I am idle my CPU hovers between 29 - 35C. Playing GPU intensive games with my 9070XT dumping some heat out pushes the CPU to around 68C to 72C in long game play sessions. Read more
If you are using an air cooling system for your computer, then you should be using "be quiet" fans to cool it. The name says it all, so let me explain. I could not get it to compute in my mind to use water to cool my cpu and/or video card. Let me think about this my MB = $199, My CPU = $750, My Video Card = 1000 and now you want me to add water (water cooling system approximately $299.) to this equation. This makes no sense to me, but I was using a very loud 100% copper cooler. I decided to make some changes and ordered a be quiet Pure Rock Pro 3 cooler. As soon as I installed it and turned my computer on I was totally shocked. NO CPU FAN NOISE. NONE. ZILCH. ZERO. I could not believe my ears. Then I began running all kinds of cpu, memory, video card, motherboard, and power supply test just to see if the cpu would heat up causing the fans to spin up. It did and the fans increased in speed but still NO SOUND came from the cooler itself. I could only get the cooler to make noise I could hear by running my 16 core cpu at 100%. Now running al cores and threads at 100% caused my temps to rise up to approximately 87C. Not good for long periods of time but doable. Over time and my trust in the "be quiet" line of products I switched over to the be quiet! Dark Rock Elite - TDP 280W CPU Cooler. Their line of air coolers are top notch. They are quiet and help to keep your cpu cool under all circumstances. I have run my computer in a lab setting testing medical simulations that run my computer processor at all cores running 100%, 16 cores/32 threads running 100% on the processor for months. The system never crashed unless I rebooted it and it was cooled only using air. The "be quiet" line of cpu coolers work great. I am very happy to have experienced this companies product as it works for me. Read more
The Dark Rock Pro 5 was used for two builds based on the Gigabyte B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 motherboard. One build went in a new Corsair Frame 4000D ATX Mid Tower case, the other in a Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 case from 2007. The CPU in both builds is the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, a 120W part for which this 270W cooler has plenty of capacity. A middle fan sits between two radiators, covered by a plate bearing the be quiet! logo that is held in place with magnets. Underneath the cover plate is a Q/P switch that allows the cooler to run in Quiet or Performance mode. The fan wiring allows the two fans to be daisy chained and connected to a single CPU_FAN header that is typically located just above the CPU socket on the motherboard. Hardware is included with the cooler that supports Intel 1851, 1700, 1200, 1150, 1151 and 1155 sockets, and AMD AM4 and AM5 sockets. The directions were clear and installation was very easy. The cooler seems to have enough capacity relative to a 120W CPU that the fans tends to stay at low RPM and are inaudible, and it really looks great on a black motherboard in a black case. The Dark Rock Pro 5 is a high quality, well designed and manufactured CPU cooler that should run for a long time. Read more
The moment you open it, out of the box, it's BIG, HEAVY, and you can tell it's made out of quality stuff. LOVE the long screw driver that it came with. In fact, I used the damn screw driver for everything to build my entire computer - thank you for including that! Installation was a breeze (just be careful not to apply too much pressure to the CPU like I did like a newbie, had to figure out why the PC would boot, oops). Connects easily to the motherboard. Thing runs DEAD SILENT even on performance mode. When I play games, I hear my GPU fans revving up but never this CPU cooler. I went for the silent - no RGB - classy setup with Fractal North mid tower case, silent wing case fans x3. I love my setup and the way it turned out! I'll always buy be quiet products from now on. Read more
extremely quiet and cools pretty well. it’s very large but the sleek design makes up for it. the build quality of both the cooler and the fans are excellent. taking off one point for the price; theres a lot of solid competition on the market for much lower prices. you are paying a significant premium for the build quality and the silence during operation. Read more
