Nothing wrong with the review. Your results are what they are and any difference in performance to other sites just indicates that these coolers are susceptible to manufacturing variations or that the difference in testing methodology has a significant impact on this model.
Looking at the HardwareCanucks review, they also questioned their results in the opposite direction - they thought it was going to be a stellar performer and when it wasn't they went back and retested and checked for external variables, but it just sucked.
There's clearly some issue with these coolers - looking at a quick sample of google results for "Dark Rock Elite Review" there's a
glaring lack of consistency.
- TPU - Editor's choice, best air cooler to date, vastly outperforming the Noctua D15
- Anandtech - Decent, but no better than a Noctua D15
- THG - Decent, ties a Noctua D15 but only tested on Intel LGA1700. Marginally better than the $33 Peerless assassin but worse than the Frost Commander 140 and Assassin IV.
- eTeknix - Good, but found zero difference between the Dark Rock Elite and Dark Rock 5, which is in stark contrast to most other reviews of both and an inconsistency of its own.
- OC3D - Decent, but inferior at both fixed fan speed and max fan speed to both the AK620 and Assassin IV
- Guru3D - Poor, barely creeping ahead of the single-tower 120mm AK500
- Hardware Canucks - disaster, despite restesting and high expectations.
- Hardware Busters - poor, matches an old Assassin III and way behind the Noctua D15.
I'm sure there are more reviews, but those are the ones I found first and skim-read. What's obvious is that performance is all over the place, which is fine if you're gambling at under $50, but this is the single most expensive air cooler ever released.
I've used a few BeQuiet! coolers, both air and AIO - and the the manufacturing quality seems decent - but the mounting system always used to be utter garbage and I remember early reviews of their first tower coolers were hurt by poor performance from uneven surface finish and concave base plates. It took BeQuiet a couple of revisions to iron out those base plate issues and now - a good 15 years later, their mounting hardware has only just caught up with the competition. I do wonder if they're struggling with either the mounting pressure still, or there's a heatpipe manufacturing issue - since there's no way the bad results in that review summary above should be achieved by a massive 7-heatpipe 140mm dual-tower.
This must be an honest mistake.
