 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the BE QUIET! I'm sorry, it's old now. Dark Rock 2, no compromise, silence and performance, up to 180W TDP, so yeah, pretty much everything. CPU cooler, LGA 2011 ready, uses Silent Wings fans, which is like, excellent. Very quiet operation at 21.2 decibels max, 135mm Silent Wings PWM fan, highly effective cooling, completely dark nickel plated, single tower layout, that actually is pretty appealing to people like me who love that, compatible with Intel and AMD. Alright, areas of application, safe cooling of high performance CPUs, even in extreme overclocking scenarios, seriously quiet PC systems with the highest standards of performance and reliability, highly effective cooling, very quiet operations thanks to Silent Wings, completely dark nickel plated, a stable backplate, ensures vibration, secure attachment, even when the computer is being transmitted, transmitted, transported, brushed aluminum cover, protects the cooling fins, design and quality control in Germany. Okay, requirements of our customers, the focus of everything that we do, aluminum top cover, 12 steel heat pipe caps, height adjustable, oh, height adjustable fan, cool, anti-vibration rubber ring, cooling fins with wave design, 6 high performance heat pipes, alright, and it should be noted that it is a valid thing to say, high performance heat pipes, because not all heat pipes are, oh my goodness, that actually looks really good. That looks just baller. I'm sort of sold already and I actually haven't seen the cooler yet. This looks like a reasonably smart mounting system, so it looks like they've got the kind where the thing screws into the thing and then that screws into the other thing, similar to what we've seen in the past. Although there are a lot of pieces which sort of gives me pause, sometimes mounting systems with lots of pieces can be a little bit challenging to put together. Let's have a look at what their instructions are like though. Okay, so they're labeling everything pretty clearly, which is nice to see. So basically, hmm, here we go, yeah, so that's LGA 2011 is what we're using this for, and that should be really easy. So you basically put this thing into the back plate that's already on the socket and then put the cooler screws into that with these things here or with something else that's also in the package I suppose. And then this is going to be your AMD as well as older Intel sockets or lesser Intel sockets such as 1155, 1156. Okay, they've got nice little exploded diagrams of everything, so it should be pretty straightforward. Let's go ahead and check out the heatsink itself. This looks like a great back plate though. Look how thick this thing is, it actually has some weight to it. Wow. Look how thick that is. Here, slick, hold this. Heavy, right? Heaviest you felt? Yep, there you go guys. And it's like solid, it's like a solid piece of metal, there's no flex to it whatsoever and it has the anti-conductive coatings already on it. I've seen ones in the past where you have to put it on yourself and I'm just like, that seems like a safety hazard because someone's not going to put it on. Someone's going to short out their expensive board which is going to destroy someone's CPU. All of those someones are probably like the same person just saying that. Like it's not like one person is going to short out their board and someone else's CPU somewhere is going to die, that's not really how it works. Alright so that, is that a 120 mil fan? Because that doesn't look like a 120 mil, that looks like a 140. Oh yeah, I was probably using the, hold on, slick's giving me a hard time about something. Silent Wings, yeah it is, it's a 135 mil fan and this is a bit of a unique design because this isn't like the regular case fan that we unboxed before because it's using a completely different mounting system just for their CPU heatsink fan. It's got a rubber ring all around the outside here so that means without any cheesy like little rubber strips that you have to sort of like stick to the heatsink fans and then they fall off and then you catch to them up, I've had this happen. The fan will always have the rubber layer on it which will keep vibration from being transmitted to the tower heatsink itself. I'd say about like an A minus sort of dark nickel plating. I can see a couple small blemishes but you'd never see them if you weren't picky like me and the fact that they've got this beautiful, beautiful brushed aluminum top piece that looks outstanding, I mean it sort of makes up for it actually because you'll never see the fins themselves anyway. They've also got, are these really metal? Oh my goodness, metal caps on the tops of the heat pipes so that you don't have to see the ugly, because you know how heat pipes have one clean end and then they have one like clamped shut end so that the fluid is sealed inside? So you don't have to see which end is the ugly end and which end is not the ugly end, they've just got caps on them and it looks outstanding. The mounting mechanism is, this is actually one of my personal favorites, the stretch it over and put it wherever you want mounting system. So that's what they mean by height adjustable I suppose because you could actually put it up higher if you had like a motherboard component that's interfering with the fan or you could put it down lower if you wanted additional airflow over the VRM of your motherboard for example and you just kind of lodge that in there assuming you can get it in. There we go and this side goes in just like that, or does it? Yes it does. Aha, locked into place, same thing on the other side. Ah yes, let's do the obligatory finger shot. So very shiny but you can see some of the machining marks on the base. It should be noted guys that mirror finish is not necessary for good contact with the CPU. In fact as you may or may not have noticed, your CPU is not mirror finish on the bottom. So it's not like you were getting like perfect mirror to mirror contact anyway. But that doesn't mean it's not flat. Although based on a quick look it has a bit of a convex shape to it which assuming you're mounting with any kind of adequate pressure can actually be an advantage because metal does have some flex and some give to it so if you're making the best contact with the middle and putting a lot of pressure it will actually spread the contact patch a little bit and you'll get the best cooling that way because the CPU die itself under the heat spreader is only about yay big anyhow. So something to note. Very shiny heat pipes. Little attention to detail stuff. See, short connector. Right? Why isn't everybody doing this? Because the CPU power pan header is never further away from the CPU than like here, this kind of radius. So it makes a lot of sense to do that and if it's a little bit closer it looks a lot cleaner if you give it a little loop like that and then just plug it in really really close. Makes everything look really clean. If you have a longer connector on the fan what it ends up looking like is kind of cheesy. I don't know if I have a, yeah I do have another one. So this for example is a CPU fan intended to be installed on a CPU so it comes with like a bracket to attach it to the cooler. So if you pull that trick on this one it still ends up looking kind of stupid because it's huge whereas if you have a nice short cable then it can look really really clean. So I think that pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Be Quiet! Dark Rock 2. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.