Last month we took a look at Be Quiet's Dark Rock Elite, the company's flagship CPU tower air cooler. The RGB LED-equipped cooler proved flashy in more ways than one, but true to its nature as a flagship product, it also carried a $115 price tag to match. Which is certainly not unearned, but it makes the Elite hard to justify when pairing it with more mainstream CPUs, especially as these chips don't throw off the same chart-topping levels of heat as their flagship counterparts.
Recognizing the limited audience for a $100+ cooler, Be Quiet! is also offering what is essentially a downmarket version of that cooler with the Dark Rock Pro 5. Utilizing the same heatsink as the Dark Rock Elite as its base, the Dark Rock Pro 5 cuts back on some of the bells and whistles that are found on the flagship Elite in order to sell at a lower price while still serving as a high-end cooler. Among these changes are getting rid of the RGB lighting, and using simple wire fan mounts in place of the Elite's nifty rails. The end result is that it allows the Dark Rock Pro 5 to hit a notably lower price point of $80, putting it within the budgets of more system builders, and making it a more practical pairing overall with mainstream CPUs.
But perhaps the most important aspect of all is a simple one: cooling performance. What does the Dark Rock Pro 5 give up in cooling performance in order to hit its lower price tag? As we'll see in this review, the answer to that is "surprisingly little," making the Dark Rock Pro 5 a very interesting choice for mid-to-high end CPUs. Particularly for system builders looking for an especially quiet CPU cooler.
