be Quiet! BK008 Pure Rock Slim - CPU Cooler - 120W

These are a dime a dozen, Cooler Master has one, Zalman has one, Thermaltake has one(hate their cheap fans, though), Corsair has one(with rgb), these are base design, base function, bare minimum effort for across the board performance, for mid level, low end processors. Good Quality with Be Quiet, there are no frills, just performance for a low end processor and easy installation, overall a good solution for cooling AM3/AM4 CPUs'.

PROS:* Excellent cooling capacity. Keeps my i7-6700 at 19-23C at idle, and 49C-52C at load.* Very quiet under normal operation, and even full fan speed is just a pleasant hum. (Granted, this is inside a Fractal Define C with all sorts of noise dampening too)* Dirt cheap* Push-pin Intel mounts by default, basically no assembly for the cooler itself other than attaching the fan and installing it onto the motherboard.CONS:* Heatsink fins are super thin, so if you have to grab onto a piece of the cooler to get enough leverage to put the fan clips on, you have to be *super careful* to not let it be a hot-dog slicer for your fingers. The fins are also very malleable, and if you don't get the clips for the fan into the fins' gaps just perfectly, you'll likely bend them. None of the above have ever been an issue whatsoever on other budget coolers from Cooler Master, for example.* Pre-applied paste is garbage. I've used 3 of these fans on 3 recent builds, and every single one also came with little flakes/strands of cardboard fiber stuck into the paste. The temps I mentioned above were achieved with Arctic Cooling MX-4, stock paste temps were roughly 5-10C higher at any given time.FINAL THOUGHTS:This cooler is a no-brainer for value and performance. My first use of one was to replace an aging Corsair H55 that had some pump issues, and I was thoroughly surprised to see a $30 budget, silent cooler basically keep pace with a closed loop AIO at its prime. Just be extremely careful during installation due to the heatsink fin sharpness & malleability, don't use the stock pre-applied paste, and you'll have an absolute winner in your hands.

I have a hackintosh server with an i5-8600 and a prior el-cheapo thermal take cooler I was using didn't particularly have any issues other than being noisy.I wanted something a little quieter so I grabbed this, pretty much the cheapest tower cooler that would fit in my case.I didn't use the be quiet fan, although I know it's good (I have a couple others in the case), I used a noctua 92mm just because I had it laying around.But the cooler's great, it keeps the i5 chilly and it's way more than enough. Never really see over 50C under load. Definitely better than the thermal take, the heat pipes and higher fin count mean I can keep the fan curve extremely low making it quieter and cooler than before.Also for am4 I suspect the mounting is a bit of a bummer, relying on the lousy spring clip and can only mount it vertical. With LGA 1151 there's no issue, just pushed in the clips and it's mounted. For AMD you may want to seek other inexpensive coolers with better mounting.

I bought the be Quiet! BK008 Pure Rock Slim to replace a brand-new LED EL Cheapo model I got off Ebay for about $12. It was cool looking, but that's where the "cool" part ended. Even though I had used the very good NHT thermal compound that Noctua uses, it was far from cool. The system is an old Phenom X4 965 system I decided to revive so I didn't want to spend bank.The old LED was near impossible to install onto the AMD clips and even more difficult to remove. I thought I would destroy my motherboard taking it off. The be Quiet!, on the other hand, has the lever-type mounting that you simply flip over to lock and back to release. NEVER get a unit that just clips on both sides.The El Cheapo cooler actually ran idle in Windows 10 at 57 Celsius in an air conditioned room. It was a 3-pin and ran from about 1700 to 2100 rpm. running Unigine Heaven benchmark, it reached 94 Celsius! Not as bad as the 99 Celsius it had reached running Prime95 before I stopped the test. For you non-converters, this is boiling water temperature!So then I installed the be Quiet! after cursing the El Cheapo one more time and the results were a bit better:Idle temps in Windows were a cool 34 C and the fan was below 1300 rpm. Even running the same Heaven benchmark, it peaked at 56 C, a full 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) difference. It was still very quiet, fan speed remaining below El Cheapo.I would have given 5 stars but the instructions, though in a lot of languages, was very poor. It does not explain how to orient the heat sink, how to orient the clip, or how to place the fan or how to attach it. It simply tells you to put the clip on, mount it to the CPU and attach the fan. These are not instructions. It is necessary to orient the heat sink properly onto the CPU. If you are using a tower case, this should be with the logo text reading right side up. If you look at the fins, one side is higher from the motherboard than the other side. This should be facing up in the case because the fan must go on the taller side.Not only this, but the clamp that you put on the base MUST be facing the proper way. It has to inserted with the lever on the top side an the plain notched piece must be on the lower side. IF you don't do this, the fan will not fit because it will hit the lever.Since they don't explain how the two clips actually mount the fan, I will try to facilitate. Face the "pretty" side of the fan away from the heat sink and hook the spring clip to the holes in the very outer part of the fan mounting holes. The little grip tab on the clip will face outward from the heat sink. Now the thin clip must go between the fins of the heat sink and hook over the wide channel in the middle of the heat sink. The top of the fan frame should be flush with the top of the heat sink. Pull the tabs of the clips upwards (in a tower) so the hook into the channel. I'll provide photos for more detail.