Be Quiet! Dark Rock 5 review

Being considered an old hand in the CPU cooler market these days, Be Quiet! has a reputation for producing good-performing coolers with minimal fuss, moody aesthetics and great build quality and the Dark Rock 5 seems to continue with that theme. There’s no RGB lighting here, but this single-fan, mid-size model does sport some refinements, compared to previous generations and is one of the best-looking Be Quiet! heatsinks we’ve seen.

Starting with the design, Be Quiet! has introduced a magnetic cap for the Dark Rock 5 that covers the heatpipes and screwdriver hole for mounting the cooler. Its coolers, especially the more premium models, haven’t exactly been ugly in the past, often sporting a black anodized finish.

However, the cap, which can rotate around depending on the cooler’s orientation, looks even better and definitely makes the cooler stand out from the crowd. That’s just as well because you’re not looking at much change from $70 or £70 from this cooler, which is pretty steep for a single fan heatsink arrangement.

There are benefits to its compact dimensions and single fan, though, such as the ability to avoid all of your memory slots allowing for unrestricted height memory modules. At 161 mm tall it’s also going to fit in practically any ATX case too. The downside is that it’s a relatively deep heatsink and six heatpipes might benefit from a second fan.

Thankfully, Be Quiet! has included the clips for one in the box, but with a peak speed of 2,100 RPM, the included Silent Wings 4 120 mm PWM fan isn’t the largest or most powerful we’ve seen included with a heatsink so we’ll have to see how it holds up against our toasty Core i7 14700K.

The machined base is nickel-plated rather than bare copper, which means if you want to use liquid metal paste, you won’t run the risk of the paste staining or being absorbed by the copper and drying out as quickly. You won’t need to do any liquid metal paste research, though, as standard thermal paste is included.

This is in the form of a tube, so you get a couple of applications as opposed to just one when the paste is pre-applied. The base also has two sprung mounting screws fixed in place, while owners of older Be Quiet! coolers will remember a separate fiddly plate had to be used to secure the cooler.

The mounting mechanism is identical to that on Be Quiet!’s liquid coolers with quite a few pieces to deal with. It’s straightforward, but probably not something you’d want to attempt with your motherboard still mounted in the case.

The exception here might be on AMD motherboards, which don’t require the included backplate. Installing the Silent Wings 4 fan is far easier, though, as the clips slot into recesses in the heatsink with minimal fuss. The same definitely can’t be said of some cheaper heatsinks.

Unfortunately, the Dark Rock 5 wasn’t quite able to tame our Core i7 14700K. For the first few minutes of our various stress tests, the temperatures were acceptable, but would steadily climb and in our torturous x264 and Cinebench stress tests, the CPU ended up coming close to 100°C and throttling.

We should emphasise this only happened during extended multi-threaded stress tests and with Intel 14th Gen CPUs, but it seems that handling high loads for long periods with these CPUs is a bit beyond the Dark Rock 5.

It was much happier in our game tests, sitting at 83°C in Metro Exodus and 87°C in our 3D Mark Steel Nomad test, but even these were noticeably higher than Noctua’s larger dual-fan NH-D15 G2. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly airflow.

The cooler was fairly quiet at full speed, hitting 50 dBA on our sound meter, which was 2 dBA quieter than the Noctua cooler, but also shoving far less air through its relatively large heatsink. It also took a long time to return our processor to idle temperatures. Adding a second fan would undoubtedly help it out in all areas.

The Be Quiet! Dark Rock 5 is an attractive cooler with excellent build quality that remains fairly quiet at full speed and doesn’t suffer from memory and motherboard compatibility issues nearly as much as larger coolers.

Even with toasty Intel 14th Gen CPUs such as our Core i7 14700K, it’s able to tame them in games, but the same can’t be said for extended multi-threaded workloads where eventually the temperature climbed high enough to see it throttle.

Coping with less power-hungry AMD processors will be a different story, though, as will avoiding multi-threaded workloads using a high-end Intel 13th or 14th Gen CPU that take more than a couple of minutes to complete.

We can’t be too critical here as a result, especially if gaming and low noise are your main focus as most scenarios are well within this cooler’s capabilities.

That said, it’s a shame a cooler costing this much can’t handle all situations with popular current CPUs at stock speed and while it includes clips for a second fan, the inclusion of one would have made it a much sweeter deal.

Ultimately, the future looks like a chillier place as far as CPUs go, with Intel’s Core Ultra 200 processors running far cooler than their predecessors so while it’s not ideal for handling everything a Core i7 or Core i9 Intel 14th Gen CPU can throw at it, the Dark Rock 5 will fare much better once Intel’s hot-running LGA1700 CPUs have been consigned to history.