Finished Looks

The Dark Rock TF might be a bit shorter than a traditional tower cooler, but it's no small fry. It has a commanding presence once installed since its aggressive profile and dark nickel-plating give it a unique appearance.


While the cooler's orientation can be changed, said orientation can impact socket clearance and pose a few other issues. Even the default configuration proves to leave much to be desired.


With such a large cooler, clearance does suffer, and it does so more than one might expect. While our two sets of memory had no issues fitting in terms of height, I did run into an unexpected issue since the first DIMM slot closest to the CPU could not be populated. With the G.Skill Trident Z, the sticks could not be installed into that slot period due to the heatpipes blocking the slot. The heatpipes directly touched the memory ICs even after I switched to standard-height sticks with no heatsinks attached. While this issue will likely not appear on all boards and configurations, it is still very concerning. When it comes to graphics cards, however, we were surprised to see that there was enough clearance for the first PCIe slot to be usable, though only barely. While the be quiet! Dark Rock TF doesn't weigh a ton, it could do with some slimming down for better clearance.