be quiet! Pure Rock 2 FX Review

Introduction

As part of be quiet!s 20th year anniversary, we got a bunch of FX Series products that try to upscale the performance of the original version by using Light Wings. One of these is the Pure Rock 2 FX, let's find out if managed to outperform the original!

What's in the Box?

Be Quiet!'s Pure Rock 2 FX comes in the usual iconic Be Quiet! CPU Cooler packaging.

Once it's opened, we will find the following items:

• be quiet! Pure Rock 2 Heatsink
• be quiet! Light Wing 120 HS (2000RPM)
• 4x Fan Clips
• Installation Hardware Intel
• Installation Hardware AMD
• Manual

Instead of adding some Thermal Paste, Be Quiet! decided to pre-apply some unnamed paste onto the cooler. This makes the installation a bit easier or faster, although we would have appreciated some left-over thermal paster, in case somebody needs to re-install the cooler later on.

On the back of the box, Be Quiet! includes a spec sheet which we summarized down below:

Compatibility

For the Pure Rock 2 FX's compatibility, Be Quiet! made sure to include every of the new and long-term relevant sockets while also including some of the older ones.

Down below you'll find the complete compatibility list:

Individual Components

Fan

Although the packaging and website state that the fan included in a Pure Rock 2 is a be quiet! Light Wing 120mm High-Speed, it is not the exact same model that you would get if you purchased the fan separately. Spinning at a maximum of 2000RPM, the included fan is 500RPM slower than the other one. At first glance, this might seem like a downgrade, however, after the benchmarks, we were so surprised by its performance, that we concluded that the heatsink is now definitely pushed to its limits. Therefore, it also seems like there would be no gain in that additional 500RPM. Thus, limiting the Fans max speed may also be seen as a positive aspect as it entirely removes the possibility of producing even more noise without any temperature-related benefit.

Other than those 500RPM, the fan is almost identical to an actual Light Wings 120mm High-Speed. It got the same static-pressure focused blade design, the same RGB ring around the fan, and RGB cutouts in the back of the frame, and is built extremely sturdy. If you would like to know more about the fan I would invite you to read our dedicated review on that topic. The only feature-related difference is that the 3-pin ARGB header now doesn't have the daisy-chain addition attached to the cable. The PWM cable is still there of course.

Heatsink

The heatsink used for the be quiet! Pure Rock 2 FX is the identical model found on the regular Pure Rock 2 Black. 155mm high and painted in black using Electrophoresis. From the nickel-plated copper base, there are 4 heat pipes traveling up 55 fins until they reach a black plated with a white be quiet! logo on it.

Benchmark

As with any other CPU cooler, the most important thing is how it performs.

To test this, we used our usual test bench with our Ryzen 9 3900x at 4.36Ghz and 1.4 Vcore.

Letting the Pure Rock 2 FX's Fan spin at its full 2000RPM, it managed to keep the CPU at 54°C above ambient. That's 6°C lower than what the original one was able to achieve, an incredibly good result!

On the Noise-to-Performance graph, it looks just as good. Competing with things like an Arctic A35, be quiet!'s own Dark Rock 4 and Dark Rock Slim. Compared to the original Pure Rock 2, the upgrade from Pure Wings to Light Wings was definitely the right call the the older one did not stand a chance!

Conclusion

We were absolutely baffled by how much of an upgrade a simple fan switch could be. Compared to the original Pure Wings version, the new and improved Light Wings version absolutely dominated the Noise-to-Performance benchmarks and managed to climb up pretty high on the brute-force benchmark list. All in all, we consider the FX Pure Rock version to be a high-end version of the previous one and we can definitely recommend it.

Build quality-wise, the FX version delivers exactly the same positive aspects as the original one, which was already up to be quiet!'s standards. On the design side, although this will always be a personal thing, it's definitely something different as the new one has RGB whereas the original one had an all-black with orange logo approach. If RGB is something that you prefer, or at least don't mind, we can only recommend going for the new one instead of the original non-fx. In most aspects, it will be equal, while noise and performance wise it is miles ahead.