Review on 🔇 Silence is Bliss! BK030 Pure Rock Slim 2, 130W TDP, CPU Cooler by Chris Long

Purchased from Quiet! BK008 Pure Rock Slim to replace the brand new LED EL Cheapo I bought on Ebay for around $12. It looked cool, but that's where the "cool" part ended. Although I used the very good NHT thermal paste that Noctua uses, it was far from cool. This is an old Phenom X4 965 system that I wanted to revive so as not to waste money. The old LED was almost impossible to install on AMD clips and even more difficult to remove. I thought I would destroy my motherboard by removing it. be quiet however, has a lever mount that you can simply flip to lock and pull out to release. NEVER buy a device that just snaps on both sides. In fact, the El Cheapo cooler was idling in Windows 10 at 57 degrees Celsius in an air-conditioned room. It was three pole and ran from around 1700 to 2100 rpm. It hit 94 degrees Celsius on the Unigine Heaven test! Not as bad as the 99 degrees Celsius it hit running Prime95 before I stopped the test. For those not converting, that's boiling water temp! Then I be Quiet! after another El Cheapo curse, and the results were slightly better: Windows idle temperature was a cool 34°C and fan speed was below 1300 rpm. Even when running the same Heaven test, it peaked at 56° C, which is a full 38°C (100 Fahrenheit) difference. It was still very quiet, with a fan speed below El Cheapo. I would give 5 stars but the instructions, although in many languages, were very poor. It doesn't explain how to align the heatsink, how to align the clip, how to place the fan, or how to attach it. It just tells you to attach the clip, install it on the processor and attach the fan. These are not instructions. You need to properly align the heatsink to the CPU. If you are using a tower case, this should be such that the logo text is read right side up. If you look at the fins, one side is higher than the motherboard than the other. This must point upwards in the case, since the fan must be on the higher side. Not only that, the clip you attach to the base MUST point in the right direction. It should be inserted with a lever on the top and the flat part with notches should be on the bottom. If you don't do this, the fan will not fit as it will hit the lever. Since they don't explain how the two clips actually secure the fan, I'll try to make it simple. Rotate the "nice" side of the fan away from the heatsink and hook the spring clip into the holes in the outermost part of the fan mounting holes. The small tab on the clip points outward from the heatsink. The thin clip should now fit between the fins of the heatsink and hook into the wide channel in the center of the heatsink. The top of the fan frame should be flush with the top of the cooler. Pull the tabs on the clips up (into the tower) to bring the hook into the channel. I will provide a photo for more details.