Be Quiet! Dark Rock TF review

Cooling 190 Page 4 of 10 Published by

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Product Installation


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You'll receive two SilentWings PWM fans. And indeed these are incredibly silent. These fans are equipped with durable fluid-dynamic bearing and smooth 6-pole motor. Additional magnetic poles serve as points of engagement of the fan, keeping the RPM stable (propelling it at 6 points) to reduce friction and noise of the rotating unit.

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So here is the phase where we slowly start assembling a test setup. Included is everything you need, there are quite a lot of components you need to assemble, this is not a very easy to install fan unit. We'll be using our Z97 TUF SaberTooth motherboard from ASUS. And immediately we run into a problem while mounting the CPU cooler retention backplate, that is not going to fit. The motherboard back-plate is in the way as the bracket is too big. There is only one solution for this ...


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The solution, we had to remove the mothjerboard bkacplat in order to be able to mount the CPU cooler backplate. That seriously sucks. So the motherboard needs to come out of the chassis unless you have a chassis with a back plate cutout. Now we first prepared and inserted the Socket 1150 back plate in our case. Just make sure the gaps/holes are aligned with the motherboard socket screws, then mount the nuts.

 

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Keep in mind that I still needed to clean up the TIM / Thermal paste here! It looks messy, I know. We mount the back plate and need to prep the cooler as some risers need to be inserted over the screws and then you can tie them down.
 

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On the CPU block we need to secure two mounting clips. Simply screw them on with the supplied screws (four of them).
 

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Now here's the crappy thing, you need to secure and mount the cooler retention clips we just installed with four nuts. These nuts are position under the radiator and in-between the motherboard. Access to this is incredibly hard if you have large sized heatsinks covering the MOSFETS and VRM area around your CPU.

I'll get even worse of you have some sort of shielding on the motherboard like the TUF SaberTooth has, and that is exactly why we use this motherboard as all cooling mounting systems IMHO simply should work. And that is not the case with the mounting system delivered with the BE Quiet Dark Rock TF. With the shielding in place we can not secure this unit as we can not secure the nuts onto the screws.

Yep, the TUF shielding needs to come off ... rediculous.


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