Epilogue
The be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5 is a large air-cooler that won’t trouble you during installation, even if your RAM modules have high heatspreaders, since you can easily adjust the height of its front fan. The build quality is high, and the exterior design looks nice, to my eyes at least. The option to select either performance or quiet mode is an interesting feature. However, most users will probably leave it to performance mode and tune the fan speed profile through the PWM controller, either an external one or the one that your mainboard has.
Performance-wise, and given the 100-dollar price, I expected more from the Dark Rock Pro 5. In my tests, the cooler stays behind other high-end coolers from Noctua and DeepCool, with a notable difference. Please remember that measuring and considering the CPU temperatures alone is not the most accurate way to evaluate a cooling system’s performance. You must also consider CPU Wattage and frequency to have a complete picture. Thanks to Powenetics v2, this is easy for me, and I have created a simple overall performance algorithm that uses this data to deliver a highly accurate overall performance score. The difference with the DeepCool Assassin III and the Noctua NH-D15S, with two fans, practically an NH-D15, is around 10% and 16%, respectively, on all test scenarios I tried. If I only considered the CPU’s operating temperature, the Dark Rock Pro 5 things would be different, but the results wouldn’t be accurate, as I explained already.
- High build quality
- Decent performance
- Easy installation
- PWM controlled fans
- Quite and performance modes (for the fan speed)
- Tough competition in this price range
- Large footprint
- No RGB lighting on the fans can be an issue for some
Why on the Cybenetics list is the Dark Rock Pro 5 THE best air cooler tested and here, on HWBusters, it did so poorly?
Additionally, the STS YouTube channel says the Dark Rock Elite (almost the same thing as DRP5) is THE best air cooler out there! Why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8TMUu-_4Ag
However, thank you for this excellent review.
On Cybenetics we test with another system, simulated load, not a real-system. The cooler on this system performs well, but in the real-system you can check on the CPU frequency as well, which plays an important role. We think on switching to a real-system on Cybenetics, but the problem is that we don’t want to reset our database in frequent intervals, once we change the testing system.