Be Quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow CPU Cooler Review

The Be Quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow (SR1) is a unorthodox proposition. At £35 it represents a reasonably well priced cooler. I’d say at that price you’re getting a fair amount of performance for your money and an excellent level of acoustic performance.

As usual you get a “job-well-done” mounting kit from Be Quiet that gives you a secure and relatively simple mount. You get quality aesthetics, excellent RAM clearance and the usual high “German standard” of engineering the community has come to expect from Be Quiet!

However, if I really look at this critically. The cooling performance for the price, is just about fair and the acoustic performance, although excellent, doesn’t do enough to make up for that. And if you consider you’ve taken a mild performance hit all so you can save 34mm of height over a standard tower CPU cooler….is it really worth it and does it really serve a functional purpose when there are other top-down CPU coolers on the market that are much smaller?

My opinion is that I appreciate Be Quiet! have done their best to get a good combination of performance, aesthetics, price and noise out of the “top-down” design, BUT, and this is a big BUT. This cooler isn’t small enough (in height) to justify its average performance. The whole thing that attracts someone to the “Top-Down” design is that they have small case and they really need to save on height – normally a mini-ITX chassis or SFF (Small Form Factor) case. Now if this were a lot smaller, it might walk off with the innovation award because its performance will suit most “mini power house” rigs based on mini-ITX motherboards and Core i5/i7 processors from the LGA 1155 socket, but it isn’t.

The Be Quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand its much better than most “Top-Down” coolers yet because it’s so tall its almost pushing into tower heatsink territory. This contradicts the “Top-Down” philosophy which is to save vertical space and it makes the average cooling performance unacceptable because it doesn’t have those large height savings to compensate.