be quiet! Dark Rock Elite Air Cooler Review

Installation was a breeze, albeit I had to mount the cooler’s middle fan upside down so the RGB cable would reach my controller as it’s not close to the CPU socket, but perhaps an ARGB cable extension in the box would have been nice too.

Stock Temperatures

Right away, the temperatures are pretty decent, and in line with what we saw on both the Dark Rock Pro 5, and the Cooler Master MA824 Stealth. Keep in mind, I’ve tested a lot of powerful AIO coolers recently, which are much more expensive than this air cooler, so the result is honestly better than it looks.

Overclocked Temperatures

Setting a fixed core overclock and setting our optimal lower voltages made a staggering difference though, with 14-16c knocked off the temperatures despite the higher system performance. Clearly, seeing if you can trim down the voltage your CPU uses is important!

Stock Acoustics

Wow, these coolers are quiet, shockingly quiet, even in the performance mode it crushes the Noctua at idle, and beats it in load too. In quiet mode… well, this is just astonishing to be honest.

Overclocked Acoustics

Without a doubt, this is the quietest CPU cooler I’ve ever heard. Not only that but the overall acoustic profile sounds great too, it’s less windy sounding than most fans and whatever be quiet! has done, they’re setting a new standard for quiet.

Cinebench R23

The cooler delivered great temperatures despite the extremely low noise performance, and you would be fooled to thinking there’s a performance trade-off, but no. In both performance and quiet mode, these are very strong Cinebench scores for our i9-12900K.

Optimisation saw the score reach 27400 in Performance mode, closely matching that of the MA824, while beating it in thermal and acoustic performance.