be quiet! Shadow Rock LP CPU Cooler Review

By Brian Nyhuis May 11, 2015

be quiet! Shadow Rock LP CPU Cooler Final Thoughts and Conclusion

be quiet!’s Shadow Rock LP was a wonderful cooler to work with and test against various applications. This cooler is designed to fit inside your HTPC or small form factor case, providing you with very good and [near] silent cooling. We found the silent part to hold true, as that’s be quiet!’s specialty.

For such a small cooler my expectations weren’t set extremely high on certain points in the performance department, but boy was I surprised! The Shadow Rock LP performed darn near as well as the full-sized CM Hyper 612 V2, which is extremely impressive. It did choke a bit on the overclock tests, but even in those overclock tests it outperformed the stock cooler at the stock 4770k frequency. If that doesn’t tell you that this little cooler kicks some serious air cooling butt, I don’t know what will.

Installation was made pretty simple thanks to proper designing by be quiet!’s engineers; I can’t say any part of it was difficult. The only place that one may be frustrated with, is the simple fact that you need to use a backplate with this cooler, but I fully expect needing one for a larger-than-stock cooler. Why may this frustrate some people? HTPC and SFF cases don’t always have rear motherboard access, thus leaving you to remove your components to install the backplate. Deal breaker? Probably not if you want to actually have vastly superior cooling in your case, over the stock HSF that is.

Overall I like the build quality and aesthetic appearance of the cooler. It will run you $43.90 shipped on Newegg, which may be a teeny bit on the pricey side, but performance received, build quality, and 3-year warranty all make it worth the investment.

So what else can I say? If you want to upgrade the cooling inside your HTPC, you absolutely should not overlook this cooler at all! Remember that little blurb in the second paragraph on the intro page? be quiet! really nailed that one!

Legit Bottom Line: If you want to boost the cooling performance of your HTPC or SFF system, be quiet!’s Shadow Rock LP is vastly superior to the stock Intel HSF and also runs very quiet.