Unboxing & Review: be quiet! Pure Rock CPU Cooler

Having a gigantic CPU cooler is not always a necessary especially on entry-level or mid-ranged system that uses CPU that doesn’t produce the amount of heat that is enough to give you a heat stroke. It’ll be wiser if one would invest in a more affordable CPU cooler that gives you a decent cooling performance and reduce the damage done to your wallet.

Thanks to be quiet! for today’s provision of the Shadow Rock Slim CPU cooler. The Pure Rock retails for $34.90 USD (roughly around RM125.73) from newegg.com for now as there are no local distributor for be quiet! products in Malaysia at the moment. Let’s move on with the review shall we?

Specifications

Model	Pure Rock
CPU Socket	Intel® LGA 2011-3/2011/1366/1156/1155/1150/775 AMD FM2+/FM2/FM1/AM3+/AM3 /AM2
Dimensions (LxWxH)	155mm x 121mm x 87.5mm
Heat Sink Material	Copper base / Copper heat pipes / Aluminum Fins
Heat Sink Weight	660g
Heat Pipe Dimensions	Ø6mm
Fan Dimensions	120 x 120 x 25 mm
Fan Speed	1500 RPM
Fan Air Flow	87 CFM ± 10%
Fan Air Pressure	1.25 mmH2O ± 10%
Fan Life Expectancy	80,000 hrs
Noise Level	19.1~26.8 dBA
Bearing Type	Sleeve
Connector	4-Pin
Rated Voltage	12 VDC
Rated Current	0.12A
Power Consumption	1.44W

Overview

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be quiet! gone with its usual dark themed box with minimalist appearance, a small image of the Pure Rock in the middle with the bottom part displaying the name, theme and some features. be quiet! has this cooler categorized as a premium product as displayed on the silver-strip at the side.

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A brief introduction of the be quiet! Pure Rock can be found at the back of the box, along with some technical specifications.

Accessories

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The content of the accessories pack:

User’s guide
Fan clip
Mounting kit for both AMD and Intel CPU
A mini spanner
A be quiet! Pure Wings 2 120mm 4-pin PWM fan

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Cost saving design isn’t something you’ll see on be quiet!’s product, even if it’s the lower end variant. The very same premium finishing touch on the Shadow Rock Slim is seen on the Pure Rock as well, the top of the heat sink is engraved with be quiet! logo and metal caps that covers the end of the heat pipes.

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From the font, we can see the arrangement of the quad 6mm heatpipes that takes away the heat from the middle of the contact block to the outermost area of the fins.

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Jagged edge increases the surface area to maximizes heat dissipation.

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At the bottom of the cooler we find a thin layer of pre-applied thermal compound that covers almost the entire base of the cooler. It’s still a good approach by be quiet! to save all the hassle for the less experienced users but unnecessary for the veterans who already know the right amount of thermal compound to apply.

Installation

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Starting off with the rubber o-rings that act as an insulating layer by preventing the screws from touching any part of the motherboard.

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The included plastic spacer is then inserted into the middle of the metal backplate.

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With the o-rings and spacers intact, insert the screws into the correct slot.

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Secure the screws with the metal spacers included and we’re done securing the backplate.

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The top mounting bracket is then secured to the spacers with the protruded section in the middle facing upwards.

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The final step is to secure the cooler to the mounting bracket with the mounting bar aligned to the fins atop of the base. A big thumbs up for be quiet! with the improved mounting mechanism that makes installation way much easier compared to the previous generation be quiet! CPU coolers.

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RAM clearance isn’t looking good for tall RAM but it won’t be an issue for RAM with standard height.

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Good clearance for graphics card helps to prevent potential short circuit caused by the metal heat sink touching components at the back of the graphics card’s PCB.

Performance Test

Test Rig Configuration
CPU Cooler	be quiet! Pure Rock
CPU	Intel Core i7 4770K
Motherboard	ASUS Maximus Gene VI
Memory	G.Skill TridentX @2400MHz
Primary Hard Drive	Kimtigo KTA-350 120GB
Power Supply	be quiet! Straight Power 10 600W
Chassis	Vector Benchcase

Moving on to the performance test, we ran the CPU stress test utility Prime95 with the option ‘In-place large FFTs’ for maximum heat from the CPU with 3 single tower CPU cooler for performance comparison:

Thermalright Archon SB-E X2
be quiet! Shadow Rock Slim
be quiet! Pure Rock
Intel i7 4770K Stock Cooler

Our room temperature throughout the test is 30ºC in average and the stress test is repeated for several times in order to get a stable and consistent temperature reading. The final result is presented in the graph as below:

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The initial run with stock speed is showing significant difference between aftermarket cooler and Intel stock cooler, where the stock cooler peaked at 86°C while others still remain at a decent temperature below 80°C.

When things got heated up a bit with our Intel i7 4770K overclocked to 4.4GHz, the Intel stock cooler failed almost in an instance. With aftermarket cooler remain standing, the be quiet! Pure Rock takes the 3rd place where the temperature peaked at 86°C.

Verdict

The past few be quiet! CPU coolers that we’ve tested has these similar traits – good looking, near silent operation, decent price over performance ratio but tricky to install. From the Pure Rock we can see that be quiet! has taken the end user’s feedback into account and improved the mounting mechanism that was once a pain to those who uses chassis without cutout on the motherboard tray.

Another observable improvement is that the fan clip is made compatible with almost any type of 120mm fan, giving you that extra flexibility in case if you wanted to experiment it with your preferred 120mm cooling fan.

Although we don’t recommending using it to tame an unlocked CPU for overclocking like the Intel i7 4770K, but being able to keep the temperature of an Intel i7 4770k running at 4.4GHz around 86°C shows that it’s still a pretty capable CPU cooler.

Retailed at approximately RM125.73, the be quiet! Pure Rock doesn’t seems to be a bad deal if you’re looking for a decent CPU cooler with a good noise/performance/price ratio.

Pros