be quiet! Pure Loop 2 360
Introduction
be quiet! undoubtedly represents one of the most premium and respected brands when it comes to their cooling solutions. Having reviewed many of them in the past, I have never failed to be impressed with their performance, and, of course, the amazingly low levels of acoustic output. A little less than three years ago, be quiet! launched its Pure Loop all-in-one watercooling kits. Today, the brand is launching a new version of the series: the Pure Loop 2. Slotting between the Silent Loop 2’s performance and the Pure Loop 2 FX RGB goodness, new Pure Loop 2 doubles on the original’s features and offers an all-black design with a brushed aluminium finish on the CPU block alongside RGB around the brand’s logo. Talking of which, the CPU block is the only portion that gets a bit of RGB lighting since the included Pure Wings 3 fans are devoid of any. However, what they lack in bling they recover thanks to optimised performance and noise, with maximum speed reaching 2,100rpm on 120mm fans and 1,800rpm on 140mm. With this new Pure Loop 2 series, be quiet! returns to the charge with a total of four AIO kits. The first, the smallest is a 120mm while the largest is the 360 mm version. We, on our side, received the Pure Loop 2 360.
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It is compatible with Intel LGA 1150, 1151, 1155, 1200, 1700, and 2011(-3) square ILM sockets. From AMD’s point of view, this cooler is compatible with AM4 and AM5 sockets.
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Packaging & Contents
As far as packaging is concerned, it is the usual design at be quiet! since we find the traditional black box. In the middle is a look at the product with the head unit illuminated, but the fans are still for added branding. Meanwhile, the top and bottom are the same with be quiet! listing the product name and radiator size on both.
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The backside of the main packing box has some key features highlighted. We will cover them later in this article. We can see a serial number sticker as well as a part number label. My only real gripe is the fact that despite having a lot of space to use (it’s a big box), the writing and images are fairly small. It’s not bad, just not the best implementation of space.
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One of the sides that offers entry inside also starts with a bit of the backstory on be quiet. There is a table showing the specifications of be quiet! Pure Loop 2 360 cooler. The contents of the box are also printed at the bottom. This cooler is designed in Germany.
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There is a QR code on the other sidethat takes you to the product page. Second, the text below the code states that the code is for the product information, and lastly, this time in gray, we see the be quiet name at the bottom.
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There is an egg carton inside the main packing box. The components of the cooler are safe and nicely placed in this carton. This helps to safeguard the contents during shipping and prevents damage. We need to slide this carton out of the main packing box. There is a brown color accessory box. It has all the mounting hardware inside. 360 is printed on a label indicating the mounting hardware for the 360mm cooler.
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Let’s take a look at what accessories are provided.They have provided a user guide with instructions on how to install this cooler on the supported sockets.
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be quiet! has emphasized servicing this cooler. For this purpose, they have provided a 100ml coolant bottle with this cooler. There is a refill port integrated into the radiator housing. Users can refill the unit should the coolant level drop in the long run. Normally, AIOs don’t have this feature, with the exception of ALPHACOOL Eisbaer and Reeven NAIA 240 coolers. The provided coolant is made of water and Propylene Glycol and supports anti-freezing to -5°C. Intel and AMD socket support is robust, with be quiet! listing support for today's mainstream sockets. In addition, be quiet! has provided a small thermal paste tube, a Y-switch and 3x zip ties for cable management.
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A Closer Look
In broad terms, be quiet! puts forward a Pure Loop 2 360 convincing with a nice design and a neat radiator.
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The be quiet! Pure Loop 2 360 has a black color finished radiator. This unit is made of aluminum material. The dimension of this radiator is 397x120x27mm. Here 27mm refers to the thickness or height of this radiator. Installing 120x25mm fans would make an overall height of 52mm. This radiator has an FPI count of 20. There is a gap of 105mm between two opposing mounting holes on the radiator’s frame. There is a gap of 15mm between any two adjacent mounting holes on one side of the frame. The total assembly is black color spray painted. This radiator has 12 channels for coolant flow. be quiet! has done a good job in fin stacking. The above picture shows a side of the radiator housing. PURE LOOP 2 is printed in white color on both sides of the frame.
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The far end or chamber of the radiator has a length of 22mm. We can spot a screw in the middle there. This screw is over a refill port. Users can service this unit by adding coolant from this dedicated port to increase the life of the cooler. be quiet! has provided a bottle of 100ml coolant for this purpose. There is no branding or sticker over this end of the radiator.
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be quiet! has integrated the pump into the tubes. This is be quiet! own design and is a second-generation pump design taking over the Pure Loop series coolers. This integration would help to reduce the vibration on the CPU socket. This is a doubly decoupled pump, and a salient highlight is that it is PWM controlled. This pump is rated to spin between 4000 to 5500 RPM. According to be quiet! this pump has effective damping, which helps in reducing overall noise and vibration.
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The doubly decoupled pump is powered by a 4-pin PWM connector cable. This is another difference between the first-generation Pure Loop coolers and second-generation Pure Loop 2 coolers, where the predecessor has a 3-pin cable to power the pump. The below picture shows the tube end of the radiator. The tube connections are concealed in metal clamps which are also black in color. There is a serial number sticker over this side. This near chamber of the radiator has a length of 14mm. be quiet! is using low-permeability rubber tubes. These tubes have a nice textured sleeve in black color wrapping them. The length of these tubes is approximately 400 mm.
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The Pure Loop 2 360 features the same block design as is on the Pure Loop series (first generation) coolers. It is quite sleek, stylish, and lightweight design. Since the pump is no longer in this housing hence lightweight. The housing seems to be made of ABS material. There is a brushed aluminum sandblasted top plate with be quiet! branding over it. It is not an RGB backlit design because there is a sleek ring running around the main body, which is digital RGB backlit. It has a dimension of 94.5x83x42mm. As we can see, there are two pre-installed screws on both ends of this block. This block is using two screws based mounting though we would like to see a four screw-based mounting for better and even mounting pressure.
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Looking at the backside of the block, the tubes are found installed in 90° orientation. They can be rotated slightly to make room or fit them as per aesthetic requirements. There is a certain gap between both tube connections. There is a flat cable coming out from the middle. be quiet! has provided a standard 3-pin, 5V RGB connector on the cable. This cable powers the digital RGB LEDs in the housing.
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The above picture shows the diffuser up close.
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Looking at the base, be quiet! has done nickel coating on a copper base plate measuring 54x54mm. There is a protective sticker on the base to protect the base from any damage during shipping. Remove this sticker before installing the block. This is a mirror finish.
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Since we are facing a 360 mm watercooling kit, we find three fans. It is the “Pure Wings 3” 120mm PWM fans. They have a maximum speed of 2100 revolutions per minute. Their rifle-type bearings that guarantee their durability.
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They are connected directly to the mainboard via a 4-pin PWM connector with the included Y-switch.
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Each mounting corner has an anti-vibration pad.
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A special feature is the use of the new “closed-loop motor” technology. This technology can be compared to cruise control in a car. The controller in the fan constantly compares the target speed with the actual speed and adjusts the power consumption accordingly to ensure the desired speed and a constant and stable performance of the fan.
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Installation Process
For the installation part, you’ll have to keep your AMD backplate, the manufacturer does not provide one. As with the first Pure Loop, the first step in mounting on an Intel socket is to put the backplate in place. To do this, nothing could be simpler as you just have to pass screws through and hold them in place with small rubber washers.
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Then, the mounting steps are easy to follow since you will have to install mounting arms on the backplate. On an AMD motherboard, you will have to remove the original ones on the motherboard before installing the new ones. By the way, to install the Pure Loop 2 FX 360 ones, don’t forget to use the plastic spacers provided in the accessory part.
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Concerning the mounting on Intel platform, the principle remains the same, but this time, the spacers are to be screwed on the backplate’s screw threads. Once in place, you just have to install the mounting arms. Once again, it is important to distinguish between the arms for the LGA-1700 with one hole and those for the LGA-1200 and LGA-1100 with two holes. Once the mechanism is ready to receive the waterblock, we put a small quantity of thermal paste on the processor and we finish the assembly by fixing it on its mechanism. This cooler has a dimension of 397 x 120 x 27mm without fans. With fans, this size is 397 x 120 x 52mm. We did not observe any clearance issue with this cooler.
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With power added to the Pure Loop 2 360, the fans spin up, the pump turns on, and the white ring around the head unit illuminates. While many may say, "it's not RGB, I don't want it." You are free to think and say such things, but many dislike unicorn farts and mismatching modes, and this is not only a simplified solution to all of that. If you decide the white clashes, unplug it and carry on.
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Testing & Methology
For today's testing, we'll be using a new test setup, so we've also tested a few other coolers as part of it for direct comparison. We have recently equipped our lineup with a Ryzen 9 5950X processor, which is significantly more demanding. Perhaps the most important thing is that we are testing in a classic case, a large and very well ventilated Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL. In addition, it also allows the installation of a 480 mm heat exchanger on the ceiling. We always install the tested AiO coolers with an exchanger on the ceiling, while there are high-quality fans on the front wall of the cabinet for good air access to the cabinet. Very quiet graphics are also installed so that it does not disturb the results.
Testing coolers in practice
What else do you need to know about our testing? We test all coolers without manual adjustment and regulation. We leave everything to automatic regulation, that is exactly how the vast majority of users will use them. Of course, all coolers (and their fans) usually have the possibility of manual regulation, which affects performance and noise. The cabinet used definitely also plays a big role, and above all the temperature in the room. In our case, the temperature during testing is always around 20, maximum 21°C.
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AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor cooling
As for the Ryzen 9 5950X processor, it also plays a big role when comparing coolers. The maximum safe operating temperature of this model is up to 95°C according to AMD. It is only at this point that the processor starts to limit clocks and therefore performance. The processor is actually made up of three separate chips under the heatspreader, so it is not a monolith (one chip). There are two 7nm 8-core/16-thread ZEN 3 and one low-end 12nm I/O pieces of silicon. The two small 7nm chips generate the most heat. In general, a larger chip area is more advantageous for cooling, as heat is dissipated more easily across the surface. However, with the current AMD ZEN chips, which are very small (only around 80mm2), the heat is extremely concentrated (as well as the transistors in the chip themselves) on a very small area. The area through which the chip transmits heat to the heatspreader is very small, which is why there are significant temperature fluctuations.
A processor such as the Ryzen 9 5950X shows significant and rapid temperature changes, depending on the load. This processor can show high temperatures, but that doesn't mean it's heating up, so to speak. It makes a big difference if you have a small 70mm2 chip with a temperature of 80°C or a 200mm2 large chip with the same temperature. The Ryzen 9 5950X is actually extremely efficient with a low base TDP of only around 105W. However, even with powerful cooling, temperature fluctuations between 65 - 85°C in various types of load and 30 - 40°C in idle states are common. In our case, we are testing a typical longer-term load in CineBench R23, and all coolers are left in their own auto-regulation mode, so the fan speed and noise are different. And so here are the main differences.
Performance
While still a couple of degrees out of the lead, one must also consider that the chart-toppers are near €200.
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We ran another test with our CPU overclocked and the be quiet! Pure Loop 2 360mm is seen doing an impressive job as well in keeping the temperature in around 77 Celsius. It is here that large AiOs dominate, which have a huge thermal capacity, and thus are able to offer the best temperatures.
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be quiet! certainly knows how to make quiet cooling systems. I am impressed with the noise output of this cooler as we saw an impressive 44 dBA reading.
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Final Thoughts
The Pure Loop 2 follows its name. It is a Pure Loop in the traditional sense. It comes with everything you need to function, and the level of performance is of today's standards, not that of a decade ago. It may not have some overly fancy software control, and it certainly does not make itself known with a display of RGB. be quiet! took an honest approach to what the market wanted, incorporated options, goodies, and did all of what we just covered without us having to sell a kidney to obtain it. With this version 2 of the Pure Loop, be quiet! does not make any convincing visual change from FX Version. On the form, we find the same kit with a waterblock with a brushed aluminum part and a worked radiator. Compared to the kits developed in collaboration with Asetek, this is a change and it is rather pleasant. Finally, the only real change concerning the visual aspect is the new Pure Wings 3 120mm PWM fans. As a reminder, with the first series, the pump was illuminated in white while the fans, Pure Wings, were devoid of LEDs. The tubing and fitting connections on the radiator are concealed using black color clamps. Another key design aspect is the integration of pump housing in the tubes instead of having it in a block. The use of damping reduces the noise and vibration as per be quiet! This cooler has rubber tubes which are low-permeation design. Another positive aspect is that the be quiet! kit does not come without anything, since we can count on a complete accessory part. There is a refill port integrated into the radiator housing on the far block or chamber. This camber has a length of 22mm. be quiet! has provided a coolant bottle in the box that has 100ml coolant. It is a premix solution that the user can use to refill the loop should the coolant level drop in the long run. The be quiet! Pure Loop 2 360 certainly proved itself to be a highly-competent cooler in both our stock and overclocked testing. While the temperature results are excellent, the real key trade in them being notably better is undoubtedly seen in the fact that despite having three fans, the Pure Loop 2 360 is exceptionally quiet! Finally, the assembly part does not present any particular difficulty, the steps of assembly are easily linked. Can you get a better AIO? If you want to nearly double the investment, you certainly can gain another four to five degrees of headroom, but do you need all of the other stuff that comes along with that bit of kit. For us, it is all perspective and market placement and we feel that be quiet and the Pure Loop 2 360 offers customers a ton of performance without getting gaudy, nor will it make you have to pick a lesser chassis or PSU due to the cooler costing too much.
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The Pure Loop 2 liquid cooler series are available at $99.90 / €89.90 / £84.99 for the 120mm model, $114.90 / €104.90 / £99.99 for the 240mm, $124.90 / €114.90 / £109.99 for 280mm, and $139.90 / €129.90 / £125.99 for 360mm, all backed by three years of warranty. When it comes to bang for the buck, be quiet! holds that crown for the moment, and with some success of these coolers, we feel they are in for, it may even lead to another, which contends even better than they currently do, but that may be asking for too much. As it is, we see no reason not to get yourself a Pure Loop 2 360mm AIO. Outside of personal preferences, we see no real reason not to. Performance is terrific, the overall build quality is top-notch, but it does lack some features of the top dogs in the game. However, with such a low cost of admittance, the Pure Loop 2 360 is a ride many will want to take. The be quiet! Pure Loop 2 360 represents an excellent choice for consumers looking for very good cooling performance combined with some of the best acoustic performance currently available on the market.
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