BeQuiet Shadow Rock 2 CPU Cooler Review

Introduction

It has been some time that has passed since we were last in touch with BeQuiet. In fact, it has been since I sat down with them at CES, but at that point, there was only talk of something new around the corner. Well here we are some nine months later and their new cooler has finally made it to the market, and we were given one to test. The odd thing about this design, is that while in most instances of a new cooler releasing with a name that everyone knows, in this instance it is Shadow Rock, where there isn't an obvious resemblance to its predecessor's design. Today we are dealing with a scenario where the latest addition looks nothing like the original.

The original Shadow Rock cooler had for heat pipes, offered some saw tooth designed fins, but was just a slightly thicker regular tower cooler. After that, the Shadow Rock name was applied to a C-Style cooler called the Top Flow. The one thing that does hold all three designs together is that they all came from BeQuiet, and that means from my experience, that while they may not look the same, they were barely audible under any condition inside of their customer's machines.

The latest cooler to hit our labs also carries the Shadow Rock moniker, but this time is called the Shadow Rock 2. While you might expect a revisit to the original design, what we are no getting is a much, much larger cooler first of all. Now the fin body is square, you can cool it from all sides, it has a fancy aluminum top plate, and again, this cooler is designed to be silent first, with everything else falling into place behind it to deliver a CPU cooler that by the looks of it, should easily be able to handle what we are about to throw at it.

Stick around for the results, as where this cooler finishes may just be a bit of a shock.