be quiet! Shadow Rock 2 Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,070 words · ~5 min read
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more welcome to my unboxing of the be quiet! Shadow Rock 2 it's designed in
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Germany Q seed in Germany and it actually like has some heft to it in
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spite of the fact that this CPU Cooler it's an air cooling heat sink is
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designed to be pretty compact so better
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compatibility especially with cases so that you're able to get lots of cooling
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so high density in a small area so the first thing we find when we open it up
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is of course mounting hardware nice solid heavy mounting hardware some
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people like things to be lightweight others like them to be heavy that's what
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I like nice heavy back plates nice solid steel hold Downs anything else is just
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sort of terrible and you probably shouldn't use it to be perfectly honest
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all right so opening it up further we get a user's manual which is black black
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and white in a variety of different languag including z German and then next
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up we've got this is actually kind of unique I haven't seen this before so the
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design of the box has little holes punched in it so it holds the top the
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Caps from the heat pipes in place to keep the heat sink from shifting around
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during shipping this way they're able to avoid having a piece of foam on the top
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of the heat sink and they can just have one on the bottom making the packaging a
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little bit more environmentally friendly so once we open it up we find a pretty
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simple overall heat sink design so there are four 8 mm heat pipes attached to an
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extremely shiny base so we'll do that obligatory finger shot right there where
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you guys can see it's basically a mirror to be clear a mirror finish is not
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necessary for heat transfer but it's obviously easier to achieve if the
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surface is flat and it's one of those things that some manufacturers throw in
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just for that bling bling the overall design of the cooler other than that
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remember guys a lot of the time for heat sinks it's more to do with the quality
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of the heat pipes than necessarily the uh the thick of them or the
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configuration of them so the rest of the design of the heat sink is actually
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pretty straightforward it is a straight up box looks just like that with heat
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pipes that are positioned so that they are carrying heat across the entire
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width so to get the best performance out of this heat sink please don't Mount the
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fan on these sides because then a lot of
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the air flow that goes through it is going to be wasted so rather you wanted
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if you wanted it in push pull you could go this way to this way unfortunately it
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doesn't include the clips you'd need to mount an additional fan out of the box
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but you could obviously jury rig something if you really wanted to the
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top has a brushed aluminum finish that's quite striking I would have preferred
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black personally but this is a nice Finishing Touch so the little texture on
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the top of the heat pipe pipe caps and the fact that they cap the heat pipes at
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all because normally heat pipes have kind of a finished end and an unfinished
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end and many manufacturers Just leave both of those exposed the fan that's
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included is one of their silent Wings fans so these are extremely
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well-regarded fans out there I wouldn't have minded seeing some noise isolation
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rubber pieces in between the fan itself but honestly I'm not feeling inclined to
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take too many marks off for it because in terms of pricing it's a very
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reasonably positioned heat sink so if it doesn't have all the little extras and
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bells and whistles I guess we can let it go as long as they don't skimp on the
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stuff that's important like the back plate so I think without further Ado I'm
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going to hand this off to Slick where he can give you guys his subjective take on
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how easy or difficult it was to mount as well as performance numbers on our
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standardized heat sink test bench I'm going to compare this cooler to its
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closest competition the Noctua nh-u14s it's bigger and slightly better
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performing which is fairly self-explanatory as you can see the graphs but the installation process was
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the biggest difference for me um I actually had a lot of trouble with it
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and ended up calling Linus in and having him do it because I have much larger
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hands than he does and you don't get to use the long extended screwdriver method
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that you do with the noct one you have to reach under the cooler and screw
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things in or use the wrench but the wrench was pretty much impossible to use
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for most angles because the motherboard we were using and my hands couldn't
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really fit under the cooler in any usable way so the installation process
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was pretty rough and I had to get outside help if I was a consumer and purchased this I would have had to get
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someone else to do it as well or I would have just had to return it I literally
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couldn't screw in I think it was the top leftand Corner screw so that was
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actually kind of a problem but other than that it performs pretty well and
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it's not too big I fit fairly large size
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RAM under it so that was pretty okay and that's about it if you like the video
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like the video If you dislike the video dislike the video and in the comments below what are you going for are you
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going for a big cooler that cools really really well or you going for that one
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that is kind of slim and looks sleek and lets all of your RAM fit perfectly and
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