Today we are checking out something cool (khem, pun intended)! Here we have Pure Loop Liquid All-In-One cooler from beQuiet! This is the 360mm version and in this video we will check what you get for your money, its performance and let you know if you should consider buying it.
This lineup has four different options to choose from, starting with 120mm and going all the way to 360mm to cover the whole range of CPU’s. I like how beQuiet! provides a little recommendation guide to help with your choice.
Right here we have the largest variant. In the box we find three Pure Wings 2 PWM fans, cooler assembly itself, mounting accessories for Intel and AMD, screws and power cables for pump and LED. These are not controllable in any way – just a simple power to SATA connection. We also have a triple fan splitter. It would be nice if the fan splitter was a little longer as right now it is hanging just above the motherboard and is a little bit messy.
They have also included some thermal paste, cable ties, manual and lastly some additional coolant. This unit actually comes pre-filled and is good to use right out of the box. beQuiet! recommends to top up the cooler if you start hearing some bubbles or in about 2 years time – the whole process is well documented in the manual.
The radiator is made out of aluminium and has a standard black finish, the cold plate on the other hand is made out of copper and is nickel plated, while the cover is aluminium with be quiet! logo, it has a narrow plastic line around it, that is going to be the only part with LED lights on so it’s pretty minimal and elegant. While I do like the clean look – I think this may be a lost opportunity to satisfy the RGB crowd.
While we are on the subject of aesthetics – you may have noticed this little hanging contraption next to the radiator. This one is slightly different from most traditional All-In-One coolers – it is a decoupled pump which due to design choices actually has the ability to slightly slide back and forth on one of the tubes. beQuiet claims that moving the pump away from the metal components dampens the vibrations, thus making the system a bit quieter. I think people who prefer a very minimalistic look will be against it, personally I think it looks OK, plus it actually comes at a very competitive price. The MSRP starts at 85 US dollars for the smallest one and goes up to 120 USD for the 360mm.
With all of that out of the way let’s check how it performs. We set it up inside beQuiet! Pure Base 500DX case with Ryzen 9 3900XT running at stock. We have also done some tests with beQuiet! Pure Rock 2 AIR cooler. This is in no way a fair comparison as AIR cooler is about 2 times cheaper, it’s just good to have a reference point for comparison.
While doing all these tests, our ambient temperature here at the office was 27C.
First we ran a Blender benchmark which consists of a short BMW test and then longer Classroom test. We can see from this graph that the CPU boosted to 4GHz and stayed there for the duration of the test.
When it comes to temperatures, these hit 95C on the AIR cooler and stayed there while under load. The Pure Loop AIO only peaked at about 80C which is a pretty good start. While benchmarking – the fan on the AIR cooler was averaging 913 RPM and Pure Loop fans were averaging 1700 RPM and this was certainly more audible. We will talk about noise levels a bit later on.
Moving on to Prime95 benchmark and here under load we are peaking at 81C with fans hitting the same 1700 RPM. It is actually expected, since the Prime95 generates a lot of heat.
To be fair, most people wouldn’t be using their PC like this. Rendering is only done for a small amount of time in comparison to actual creative workloads so let’s check something more realistic.
Here we have two games running at 1080p with maxed out settings thus utilising the CPU more than GPU. Starting with Ghost Recon Breakpoint we see on average CPU is at 55C with peaks to 65C, I consider this as a very good performance.
When we look at the fan speeds, these were staying between 750 and 1100 RPM most of the time. To be fair we have now tripled the amount of fans in comparison to the AIR cooler so I would expect them to spin quite slow.
In Metro Exodus the temperature using Pure Loop is staying mostly under 60C. This game is a lot more GPU intensive which explains why the CPU is running pretty cool anyway.
When checking out fan speeds, we see them mostly staying under 1000 RPM which is about 50% of the rated speed.
This brings us quite well to testing the fan loudness and I have very high expectations in this section – after all this is beQuiet! product. For this test we are using the same rig and manually adjusting the fan speeds between 25, 50 and 100%, the noise is being measured 80 cm away from the PC and our room noise floor is 38.3 dBa.
Starting with 25% speed we see 39.2 dBa on the AIR cooler and 43dBa on the AIO. Moving up to 50% speed we have 39.7dBa on the AIR cooler and 49dBa on the AIO. And lastly at full speed we have 40.2 dBa on the AIR cooler and 50dBa on the AIO. Of course the liquid AIO in this test would be much louder, first of all it has 3 fans rather than one and also they are two times the speed. I actually expected them to get even louder.
Something to note: the fans on the Pure Loop are rated at 2000 RPM at max speed, we found that they can hit 2050 RPM while at 100%, when at 50% they spin at 1600 RPM and at 25% they hit 1350 RPM. So with this in mind if we compare it to the benchmarks we have done earlier the fans would operate mostly between 25% and 50% speed which is actually pretty quiet.
Based on acoustics together with the cooling performance this cooler is actually pretty good, the only thing we are not able to check is how durable it is. It does come with a 3 year manufacturer warranty and at this price they look like a pretty good deal.
Affiliate disclosure: as an Amazon Associate, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases from Amazon.