be quiet! Dark Rock 3 Silent Wings CPU Cooler Review

Performance

The first we noticed about the Dark Rock 3 is that it had a super low idle temperature, beating out everything else we’ve tested! Load temperature however wasn’t fantastic although its still far from poor performance.

On the plus side, it is one of the quietest coolers we’ve ever tested and I guess be quiet! wouldn’t be doing their job if their coolers were anything louder than a distant whisper, the Dark Rock 3 was just 1-2dBA above ambient.

Idle temps were fairly average for a cooler of this size, as too were load temperatures. To be honest, the performance is nothing exciting, but it is more than good enough to run an overclocked CPU competently.

This is where the be quiet! really comes into play, while cooling performance may be fairly standard the acoustic performance really pays off when overclocking and its easily the quietest cooler we’ve tested under overclocked, heavy load conditions. Put simply, it is so quiet you will no hear it unless you have the cooler outside of a chassis and about 10cm from your ear.