Overall and Final Verdict
As a system builder, the ease of install on a product with this much bulk alone is enough for the Dark Rock Pro 2 to garner praise. Couple that with the sheer amount of performance the seven heatpipe design is able to muster at such a quiet operating levels and you have yourself quite the capable cooler. The cooler is so efficient that at idle startup the test bench actually errored out because the fan would only have to run at 500RPM to keep the processor at 27oC.
The glaring issues are the ones that plague most of these large multi-heatpipe designs and that is space. The Dark Rock Pro 2 requires low profile DIMMs and wider cases to fit in. While it doesn’t crowd the PCI-e x1 slot or 8-pin motherboard power it does make maneuvering around that second of the board more painful than it needs to be.
Still with coolers of this type you take the size issues with a grain of salt simply because of the amount of performance gained with all the extra copper and aluminum. Size aside, the Dark Rock Pro 2 is an exceptional cooler and well worth the money if you have the space to fit it in your setup. The numbers shown by our peak test show you have more than enough room for a mild overclocking before resorting to more severe options and the ease of install isn’t going to leave you pressed for time. Be Quiet! has proven they are more than capable of making more than just power supplies.
