Specifications, Availability and Pricing

The tower cooler from be quiet is built from a milled copper base, to which six 6mm heat pipes are soldered into the base, both of which are then nickel plated. These six pipes are pressed into 44 aluminum fins with a "V-wedge" taken out of the leading edge of each fin. This is then topped with a brushed aluminum cover that gets anodized black and bears the be quiet name in chrome letters in the center. Dimensionally the cooler is roughly 160mm from the CPU IHS to the top of the cooler and 120mm wide and 73mm deep. These are dimensions without the fan. This will increase the overall height as well as the width when a fan is installed.

Speaking of the fan, you get a single 135mm SilentWings PWM fan with a four-pin connection to cool this beefy tower. The fan states it has a super low dBA rating of 21.2 while at full speed of 1300 RPMs. The seven, specially designed blades with grooves in them, is supported with a Fluid Dynamic Bearing and is rated to continue to spin for up to 300,000 hours of operation. The fan also has a soft plastic, almost rubber-like fan frame. As it sits against the fins, it will leave marks in the frame as the leading edges of the frame act as an anti-vibration measure when the combination is together and cooling your processor. On that note, you can be using anything from socket 754 on AMD and LGA775 on Intel, right on up to all of the latest sockets with the Dark Rock 2.

I am sad to say that as much as I tried, I wasn't able to locate the be quiet line at any of the major e-tailors on this side of the pond. That isn't to say they won't be here, just not yet. For those of you on the other side of the Atlantic, the press release delivered a few weeks back had an MSRP attached with the press release of 55 Euros. Doing a direct conversion for those who don't follow global economics, that is roughly $69 dollars for the Dark Rock 2.

That in mind, I am eager to test this cooler and see what sort of potential it has. There have been a few cooler to pass across my desk lately in this range lately from Cooler Master and Xigmatek. Let's see how be quite stacks up against a couple of major players that everyone is already accustomed to.