 Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you'll like. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing of the Be Quiet Shadow Rock 2. It's designed in Germany, QC'd in Germany, and it actually has some heft to it in spite of the fact that this CPU cooler, it's an air cooling heatsink, 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 backplates, nice solid steel hold downs. Anything else is just sort of terrible, and you probably shouldn't use it, to be perfectly honest. Alright, so opening it up further we get a user's manual, which is black and white, and in a variety of different languages, 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 heatsink from shifting around during shipping. This way they're able to avoid having a piece of foam on the top of the heatsink, 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 heatsink design. So there are four 8mm 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 heatsinks, it's more to do with the quality of the heat pipes than necessarily the thickness of them or the configuration of them. So the rest of the design of the heatsink 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 heatsink, please don't mount the fan on these sides, because then a lot of the airflow that goes through it is going to be wasted. So rather you want it, 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 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 backplate. 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. 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 Noctua 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 of 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 left-hand 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 liked the video, like the video. If you disliked 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 are you going for that one that is kind of slim and looks sleek and lets all of your RAM fit perfectly? And as always, subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.