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more welcome to my unboxing of the be quiet! Shadow Rock 2 it's designed in
Germany Q seed in Germany and it actually like has some heft to it in
spite of the fact that this CPU Cooler it's an air cooling heat sink is
designed to be pretty compact so better
compatibility especially with cases so that you're able to get lots of cooling
so high density in a small area so the first thing we find when we open it up
is of course mounting hardware nice solid heavy mounting hardware some
people like things to be lightweight others like them to be heavy that's what
I like nice heavy back plates nice solid steel hold Downs anything else is just
sort of terrible and you probably shouldn't use it to be perfectly honest
all right so opening it up further we get a user's manual which is black black
and white in a variety of different languag including z German and then next
up we've got this is actually kind of unique I haven't seen this before so the
design of the box has little holes punched in it so it holds the top the
Caps from the heat pipes in place to keep the heat sink from shifting around
during shipping this way they're able to avoid having a piece of foam on the top
of the heat sink and they can just have one on the bottom making the packaging a
little bit more environmentally friendly so once we open it up we find a pretty
simple overall heat sink design so there are four 8 mm heat pipes attached to an
extremely shiny base so we'll do that obligatory finger shot right there where
you guys can see it's basically a mirror to be clear a mirror finish is not
necessary for heat transfer but it's obviously easier to achieve if the
surface is flat and it's one of those things that some manufacturers throw in
just for that bling bling the overall design of the cooler other than that
remember guys a lot of the time for heat sinks it's more to do with the quality
of the heat pipes than necessarily the uh the thick of them or the
configuration of them so the rest of the design of the heat sink is actually
pretty straightforward it is a straight up box looks just like that with heat
pipes that are positioned so that they are carrying heat across the entire
width so to get the best performance out of this heat sink please don't Mount the
fan on these sides because then a lot of
the air flow that goes through it is going to be wasted so rather you wanted
if you wanted it in push pull you could go this way to this way unfortunately it
doesn't include the clips you'd need to mount an additional fan out of the box
but you could obviously jury rig something if you really wanted to the
top has a brushed aluminum finish that's quite striking I would have preferred
black personally but this is a nice Finishing Touch so the little texture on
the top of the heat pipe pipe caps and the fact that they cap the heat pipes at
all because normally heat pipes have kind of a finished end and an unfinished
end and many manufacturers Just leave both of those exposed the fan that's
included is one of their silent Wings fans so these are extremely
well-regarded fans out there I wouldn't have minded seeing some noise isolation
rubber pieces in between the fan itself but honestly I'm not feeling inclined to
take too many marks off for it because in terms of pricing it's a very
reasonably positioned heat sink so if it doesn't have all the little extras and
bells and whistles I guess we can let it go as long as they don't skimp on the
stuff that's important like the back plate so I think without further Ado I'm
going to hand this off to Slick where he can give you guys his subjective take on
how easy or difficult it was to mount as well as performance numbers on our
standardized heat sink test bench I'm going to compare this cooler to its
closest competition the Noctua nh-u14s it's bigger and slightly better
performing which is fairly self-explanatory as you can see the graphs but the installation process was
the biggest difference for me um I actually had a lot of trouble with it
and ended up calling Linus in and having him do it because I have much larger
hands than he does and you don't get to use the long extended screwdriver method
that you do with the noct one you have to reach under the cooler and screw
things in or use the wrench but the wrench was pretty much impossible to use
for most angles because the motherboard we were using and my hands couldn't
really fit under the cooler in any usable way so the installation process
was pretty rough and I had to get outside help if I was a consumer and purchased this I would have had to get
someone else to do it as well or I would have just had to return it I literally
couldn't screw in I think it was the top leftand Corner screw so that was
actually kind of a problem but other than that it performs pretty well and
it's not too big I fit fairly large size
RAM under it so that was pretty okay and that's about it if you like the video
like the video If you dislike the video dislike the video and in the comments below what are you going for are you
going for a big cooler that cools really really well or you going for that one
that is kind of slim and looks sleek and lets all of your RAM fit perfectly and
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