be quiet! Shadow Rock TF 2 CPU Cooler Review

be quiet! Shadow Rock TF 2 The new be quiet! Shadow Rock TF 2 looks set to improve on an already impressive range of CPU coolers. be quiet! are one of the top premium brands on the market today, and while they're often a little more expensive, they deliver premium products that are worthy of their asking price. Today, we'll be taking a look at the new TF2. The TF2 is specially designed to consume less space within a chassis without cutting down on the surface area. This means high-performance cooling should be delivered, while still allowing you to use a slimmer HTPC type chassis! "Shadow Rock TF 2 is the perfect cooler for PC systems with restricted space. It offers the best mix of performance and price in the premium compact CPU cooler segment." - be quiet! Features Space-saving top-flow construction Very high cooling capacity of 160W TDP Direct connection of baseplate to cooling fins for fast heat transfer Small, diagonally arranged fins create an airflow that ensures perfect cooling for components near to the socket Silence-optimized 135mm be quiet! fan (max. 24.4dB(A)) with durable rifle-bearing technology Five high-performance 6mm heat pipes Compatibility with Intel® and AMDTM sockets 3-year manufacturer’s warranty Product Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM9VtDbe6n0 "Our german design team has to summon up all the be quiet! know-how in order to build the perfect top-flow air cooler. The video explains how we were able to build a compact cooler while retaining our well known whisper-quiet operation and still deliever 160 Watt TDP. More information." - be quiet! What's in the Box Everything that comes with the cooler is what you would expect. There's an AMD and Intel mounting kit. Unfortunately, it looks like it has their old style mounting kit, which I've often found to be clunky and put simply, a freaking nightmare to use... but we'll power through that for now, we have testing to do! A Closer Look be quiet! always nail their product design, and that's certainly true here. The TF 2 looks superb, and that's thanks in no small part to their in-house designed fans. The 135mm design fan is one of the quietest on the market and since I've used them myself on various builds, I can certainly attest to that. Aesthetically speaking, the all black fans are some of the best designed on the market today. There are five heat pipes on this cooler, which pass through the CPU block at the bottom, then through the large heat sink that sits parallel, albeit raised above, the CPU mounting. The fan is mounted to the cooler using a simple bent metal retention clip. This means you can fairly easily remove the fan from the top of the cooler without removing the cooler from your motherboard. This makes cleaning and maintaining the fan and cooling tower much easier. The cooling tower design is certainly unique. There's a smaller bridge tower from the CPU block, passing up to the main block. This is no doubt to increase the surface area and should provide some extra heat dissipation direction from the CPU block. For ease of installation, be quiet! pre-apply thermal paste for you. There are screw mounts on the block, allowing you to fit the AMD or Intel plates. Installation Normally, I will photograph a coolers mounting process. However, the be quiet! one is just so damn awkward to do. The process is made infinitely worse by the large VRM cooler on our motherboard. Any hope of installing this inside a chassis are gone. To install this, I need to remove the board from the bench, sit on the couch, the motherboard on my lap. You need to thread the small screws over the self-assembly brackets. A tiny off-set spanner is then needed to tighten them and it's a small tool, small screws, and dropping them is common. Honestly be quiet!, figure out a way to do this with a screwdriver please! It's not impossible, obviously, but it's not easy either and may put off some inexperienced system builders. Anyway, moving on for now, the cooler looks great in situ, and the design means great clearance for memory and a low height that's unlikely to conflict with your chassis. Test System and Methodology Please note that our testing system was completely revised in September 2017. That means all previous results have been scrapped, and a new set of benchmarks introduced. For a look at our previous reviews, please consult our most recent review that used that system. Please note that we re-tested the Noctua NH-D15S as our base benchmark for cooling results. Test system: Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9 Z270 Intel Core i7-7700K Delidded w/ NT-H1 under IHS Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti 32GB Crucial DDR4 2400 MHz 512GB OCZ SSD be quiet! Dark Power Pro 800W Lian Li T80 Test Bench All testing conducted using NT-H1 thermal paste We’d like to say a big thank you to Gigabyte, Noctua, Crucial, Intel, OCZ, be quiet!, and Lian Li for providing us with the above testing equipment and their on-going support. Testing Methodology We always use Noctua Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste to make sure testing reveals the efficiency of the tested coolers not the efficiency of the bundled thermal paste Prime 95 is run for 10 minutes to calculate "load" results Unigine Superposition is run for 10 minutes to calculate "gaming" results The average temperature across all cores is taken Fans are left to operate at default PWM profile speeds unless otherwise stated For water cooling tests, all pumps have been operated at 12 volts unless otherwise stated Ambient temperatures should be between 21-23 degrees in all our tests unless otherwise stated Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally and 10cm vertically away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled Stock tests are performed using "out of the box" settings for the CPU Overclocking tests are performed with the CPU set to 5 GHz and 1.345v All coolers were tested under identical settings unless otherwise stated. There is approximately a 1-degree Celsius margin of error in our temperature recording software CPUID HW Monitor There is approximately a 1.5dBA margin of error with our Benetech GM1351 decibel meter In all these graphs we may have a few "reference" results of particular products that do not fit within that category for comparative purposes. Software Used CPUID HWMonitor Prime 95 Unigine Superposition (1080 Extreme) Performance At stock clocks, the be quiet! Shadow Rock TF 2 kept our Intel Core i7-7700K at 30c idle, 40c under gaming load, and 70c when stressed. It doesn't look like a great score, as since we revised our testing, all the other coolers here are more expensive than the TF2. This is a reasonable score, and I expect that will show as we test more coolers in the coming days and weeks. An overclocking CPU this is not, but that's hardly a shock. Of course, it's built for low noise and features a compact design, so if you're not stressing the CPU like we did, it is competitive in normal day-to-day loads. be quiet! has always been good at looking after their legacy. "be quiet!" is something they live by, and the TF2 barely makes a whisper. Pushing up the head didn't push up the acoustics either, this cooler is as quiet as a mouse. Sure, Noctua is quieter, but it is also more expensive and uses a larger fan, so that's pretty much a given here. Final Thoughts Pricing The be quiet! Shadow Rock TF 2 CPU cooler is available now from most major retailers and OCUK stock it for £59.99. While this isn't cheap, but be quiet! build quality and their 3-year warranty go a long way to justifying that. Even one of those fans doesn't get you change from £20 on their own, but they are very nice. Overview There's certainly a market for this cooler, but it's not a big one. For those building an HTPC system, perhaps one with a GPU in it, so there are at least a few inches of height, this cooler is ideal. A large tower cooler or AIO liquid cooler typically wouldn't fit. The Top Flow 2 manages to keep a large surface area and lays the tower parallel to the motherboard. This cuts down on the space but doesn't cut down the surface area. Performance The performance of this cooler is pretty decent. It's certainly better than the piddly little low-profile coolers that are on the market. I mean stuff like a stock cooler or similar models from other manufacturers. However, how well it performs is very dependant on your CPU. For our overclocked i7-7700K, I think we need a bigger cooler. If you're not overclocking though, and many don't want to or don't even have an overclocking CPU, then it'll make light work of it. The fan is whisper quiet too. If you are building an HTPC or living room focused system, silence is a big deal. Noctua's NH-D15S just won't fit in many HTPC chassis, and the be quiet! certainly, will. Mounting Kit! However, the bad news is I hate that mounting kit. Unfortunately, the whole thing feels outdated, clunky and like an afterthought. Cryorig and Noctua use holes in their coolers so a screwdriver can reach. However, rival products performed great even with those holes, so this is something I really hope be quiet! address in their upcoming products. Pros Stylish design Great quality 135mm fan Trusted brand name Great for HTPC 3-year warranty Competitive performance Cons Not ideal for heavy overclocking (i7-7700K 5 GHz tested) Clunky mounting kit Neutral A little expensive and targets a small part of the market