Reviews - be quiet! Shadow Rock TopFlow

[HEXUS]

Low-profile, high on performance and ultra-quiet?

Read more.

[blokeinkent]

:EDIT: ignore me, not awake properly yet

[scaryjim]

A couple of things really: first, can we please refrain from calling a cooler 125mm tall "low profile"? You're going to need a full height(/width, if you're looking at towers) case to fit it in, and a reasonably sized one at that. It's the same with RAM - we're suddenly calling perfectly normal RAM low profile just because it doesn't have ridiculous fins stuck on top of it. Yes, this cooler is smaller than most big tower coolers, but it does nothing to deserve the name "low profile", whatever be quiet!'s marketing department say

And second, when did tower coolers become the "traditional" design? Surely the top-down design is more traditional? It's certainly the one I saw most often back in the early days of having to actively cool Pentiums

[Terbinator]

Traditional in the sense of after-market coolers? I wasn't around the real Pentium days so i can't say

I agree about the RAM/cooler thing, though.

[scaryjim]

Traditional in the sense of after-market coolers?

Maybe in the last few years, but even when I was building Athlon XP computers after-market coolers were generally still just better-than-reference top-down designs.

Hmm, this is interesting reading: a 2007 25 cooler round-up from hexus: http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/coolin...ler-mega-test/ There's a fairly even mix of towers and top-down variants there (along with a couple of more esoteric oddities!). Prior to that Hexus has very few cooler reviews (e.g. here's what a scythe aftermarket cooler was like in 2003!), so I guess 2006/2007 (which was A64 v P4 leading into Core 2 times) was probably the start of the third party cooler market (which makes sense given the rapidly increasing P4 TDPs at the time!).