be quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow

Review: be quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow

by Parm Mann on 5 October 2012, 09:19 4.0

Final Thoughts and Rating

HEXUS Snapshot:

...the Shadow Rock TopFlow does well to keep a Core i7-3770K running reasonably cool at 4.4GHz. Better yet, it offers a certain level of performance while making very little noise.

Whether you're in the market for a power supply, a cooler or a simple fan, be quiet! is a brand that should most certainly be on your radar.

Top-notch build quality, good performance and near-silent operation are just some of the attributes that have become synonymous with many of the company's products, and though there's room for improvement, the Shadow Rock TopFlow acts as an extension of that winning formula.

For a low-profile solution, cooling performance is comfortably better than reference and the Shadow Rock TopFlow does well to keep a Core i7-3770K running reasonably cool at 4.4GHz. Better yet, it offers a certain level of performance while making very little noise.

be quiet!'s sub-£40 price tag is keen - at least compared to rival top-down solutions - but there are a few provisos to be aware of. If cooling performance on an overclocked chip is your primary concern, a traditional tower will almost certainly be more efficient, and don't be too easily lured by the Shadow Rock TopFlow's classification as a low-profile cooler. Sure, it's shorter than most high-end alternatives, but it's still a sizeable beast.

Then again, sit the Shadow Rock TopFlow on top of a mini-ITX board and it won't just cool the CPU, it'll act as a giant heatsink for practically the entire board.

The Good

Good top-down cooling performance
135mm fan is very quiet
Will cool an overclocked chip
Competitive pricing

The Bad

Installation can be tricky
Low-profile, but not entirely space saving

HEXUS Rating

be quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow

HEXUS Awards

be quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow

HEXUS Where2Buy

The be quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow CPU cooler is available to purchase from Scan Computers*.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

*UK-based HEXUS community members are eligible for free delivery and priority customer service through the SCAN.care@HEXUS forum.

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:EDIT: ignore me, not awake properly yet

A couple of things really: first, can we please refrain from calling a cooler 125mm tall “low profile”? You're going to need a full height(/width, if you're looking at towers) case to fit it in, and a reasonably sized one at that. It's the same with RAM - we're suddenly calling perfectly normal RAM low profile just because it doesn't have ridiculous fins stuck on top of it. Yes, this cooler is smaller than most big tower coolers, but it does nothing to deserve the name “low profile”, whatever be quiet!'s marketing department say ;)

And second, when did tower coolers become the “traditional” design? Surely the top-down design is more traditional? It's certainly the one I saw most often back in the early days of having to actively cool Pentiums :mrgreen:

Traditional in the sense of after-market coolers? I wasn't around the real Pentium days so i can't say :P

I agree about the RAM/cooler thing, though.

Terbinator
Traditional in the sense of after-market coolers?

Maybe in the last few years, but even when I was building Athlon XP computers after-market coolers were generally still just better-than-reference top-down designs.

Hmm, this is interesting reading: a 2007 25 cooler round-up from hexus: http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cooling/8757-lga-775-cpu-cooler-mega-test/ :D There's a fairly even mix of towers and top-down variants there (along with a couple of more esoteric oddities!). Prior to that Hexus has very few cooler reviews (e.g. here's what a scythe aftermarket cooler was like in 2003!), so I guess 2006/2007 (which was A64 v P4 leading into Core 2 times) was probably the start of the third party cooler market (which makes sense given the rapidly increasing P4 TDPs at the time!).