Be Quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow CPU Cooler Review

The Be Quiet! mounting kit is one I am personally very familiar with. It has only changed slightly since the first instalment of the Be Quiet! Dark Rock series – the only noticeable difference has been a change in the type of spacer used. I am not the greatest fan of the Be Quiet! style of mounting – although it does tend to give the best contact – I prefer mounting mechanisms where the backplate can be secured into place without the cooler installed and you can then mount the cooler to the backplate without having to worry about the backplate screws falling out. Cooler Master use that type of design.

To mount the Be Quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow you have to install the backplate using the screws, backplate and the spacers to hold it loosely in place. With the backplate held on, you then install the correct brackets onto the cooler. With the correct brackets installed you screw the backplate screws into the cooler mounting brackets and this firmly secures the mount. This type of mount is best done inside the case, as if you do it outside there are just too many things to hold and it can become tricky.

Like we mentioned a few times already there are two ways to mount this cooler (on an LGA 1155 system anyway). Firstly you can do it like below, where the heat pipes face the RAM. This configuration gives you full clearance of all the DIMM slots so you can populate them all with high profile RAM. If you have a large rear exhaust case fan this might be a tight squeeze. The way the fan cable just dropped down next to the CPU fan header suggested to me that the Shadow Rock TopFlow was meant to be mounted in this position.

The second position is when you mounting it with the heat pipes facing the rear of the case or motherboard I/O area. This way will see the heatsink cover all four RAM slots but because its quite high you should be able to fit the vast majority of high profile RAM modules under it – we were able to fit the G.Skill Trident X underneath it easily.

Neither position should change performance because its “Top-Down” airflow not horizontal, in other words it will always be “against” the natural flow of the case (front-to-back).

As you can see RAM clearance is fine with this mounting configuration, so use any RAM you choose.

Because it is so high up we don’t anticipate you’d get any VRM heatsink clearance issues on your motherboard either.