Be quiet! is one of Germany's top manufacturers of power supplies and is well known outside the US, but are merging into the US market with a full line of power supplies and high end air cooling solutions, including the Dark Rock and Shadow Rock product lines. Be quiet! has won the Manufacturer of the Year award six times in a row from the German hardware magazine PC Gamers Hardware. The German engineered Shadow Rock 2 is be quiet!'s single tower / single fan 180W TDP cooling solution that is a notch below the Dark Rock 2. The Shadow Rock 2 features four large diameter (8mm) shiny copper heat pipes and is designed for the latest CPUs.

If you are not familiar with the Shadow Rock series, be quiet! has the Shadow Rock Slim and the Shadow Rock TOPFLOW, which are both 160W TDP units. Today we will see just how well the latest model in the series, the Shadow Rock 2, handles the job. If you like to experiment with overclocking and push the thermal limits of your system, then you know the importance of a capable CPU cooler. And while water cooling has certainly become mainstream, air cooling is nothing to be shrugged off.