Be Quiet! Dark Rock Pro 2 CPU Cooler Review

One of the aspects that Be Quiet! has improved with the Dark Rock Pro 2 is the mounting mechanism.  It has to be said that it was that only negative aspect of the original cooler.  Be Quiet! include a comprehensive installation guide with the cooler which guides us through the process.

First of all we must attach the CPU cooler backplate using bolts which pass through the holes in the motherboard.  These are held in place by clips which prevents the backplate or screws from falling out during installation.  On the original cooler these were held in place by rubber rings which had a tendency to fall off.

Then we can attach the appropriate mounting brackets to the CPU block.  If you're installing on an Intel system there are two different types of bracket, one for sockets 1155 and 1156 and one for sockets 775, 1366 and 2011.  There are some additional mounting accessories included for installing the cooler on a socket 2011 motherboard.  We installed the cooler on an Ivy Bridge motherboard which features socket 1155.

Once this step has been completed it's a simple matter of applying the thermal paste to the CPU and then placing the cooler on the top.  We used Arctic Cooling MX-4 thermal paste rather than the paste included with the cooler.  It can then be screwed into place from the reverse side of the motherboard.  This seemed much simpler than when we installed the original cooler.  This could be because we have now had a fair amount of practice installing coolers with this mounting mechanism but it wasn't too difficult.

The only difficult part is holding the cooler in place when screwing it in from the back.  This isn't too difficult if you're installing it with the motherboard in the case but can be more complicated if it's not.  However, there is a simple way to install the cooper in this situation, by placing the cooler upside down then placing the motherboard on top and screwing it in.

Due to the size of the cooler, there could be some potential compatibility issues with tall RAM headspreaders.  We had no trouble with the Kingston HyperX Genesis low profile memory we used in our test system but this doesn't have protruding heatspreaders.

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