The Be Quiet! Pure Loop 280mm AIO Cooler Review: Quiet Without Compromise
by E. Fylladitakis on October 14, 2021 9:00 AM ESTConclusion
Be Quiet! designed the Pure Loop series to be a reflection of the company’s ideals – simple, subtle, effective, and focused on operating with the lowest possible levels of noise. From what we've seen during our testing the 280 mm version of the Pure Loop cooler, we conclude that the cooler has certainly lived up to those ideas, making for a major win for Be Quiet!.
The thermal performance of the Pure Loop 280 mm cooler is good, yet as you might expect for an acoustics-focused cooler, unexcitedly so. It does not do much better than most other AIO coolers, and many other products using two 140 mm fans tend to offer better thermal performance. As a matter of fact, even some 240 mm solutions can thermally outperform the 280 mm version of the Pure Loop.
However, when taking noise levels into consideration, the tables shift dramatically. The Pure Loop 280 delivered impressively low noise figures, making for the quietest two-fan cooler that we have ever tested here at AnandTech. And when we plotted that as part of a thermal resistance to sound pressure level chart, we could clearly see the Pure Loop 280 going head-on with products that cost twice or thrice as much.
Be Quiet! is a company that usually goes with subtle designs and the Pure Loop series are no exception. The Pure Loop 280 visually is very serious and elegant, based on clean, basic geometric shapes. It would probably look out of place in an extravagant PC with colorful RGB lighting all around it but it will definitely look great when the aesthetic theme needs to be clean and serious.
In conclusion, we find that the Be Quiet! Pure Loop 280 cooler is an excellent product. Even with the focus on keeping noise levels down, Be Quiet! hasn't left thermal performance behind, so the Pure Loop offers a very good balance between thermal performance and acoustics. And they're able to do all of this while keeping the price of the cooler quite reasonable (despite the ongoing pandemic), with the Pure Loop 280 easily found for less than $110. Taking in consideration both the cooler's performance and that low price tag, we can say that the Pure Loop 280 is a very good deal for users who want great overall cooler performance combined with an elegant appearance.
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Alistair - Thursday, October 14, 2021 - link
I didn't read any clear distinction between pump noise and fan noise. Is the pump especially nice sounding or quiet also? Or just the fans run slower than the Corsair one, if so, Corsair is still a great option as long as the Corsair pump is quiet.Tom Sunday - Thursday, October 14, 2021 - link
Be Quiet is a fine company out of the Hamburg area in North Germany. Great to see the Germans now producing more high-quality goods for sale in the U.S and in the PC hobbyist world. I would most certainly buy from 'be-quiet' first and not Corsair who is satisfying their investors with mostly cheaper China goods all to making a bigger buck and over-marketing their products. As to cooling, the AIO market has always been way overpriced and much overrated; their pumps have never been perfected after all this time. And do I really care if my PC runs 10 degrees hotter? My Noctua D15 has been with me now for 10-years and straddled three completely new system builds. No downtime. I am now ready for Alder Lake with a Z690 Asus Hero MB, DDR5 and stuffed into a EATX. No doubt the 'be quiet' Dark Rock TF2 is on the bill and in 2022 my first cooler replacement in 11-years. Greetings from Stehekin, WA where you have to make things count!Oxford Guy - Friday, October 15, 2021 - link
My Corsair H50 exploded, destroying a video card and making a huge mess. Somehow the motherboard survived.COtech - Sunday, October 24, 2021 - link
These Be Quiet coolers are made in China just like the Corsair ones.Purpose - Friday, October 15, 2021 - link
This is a U-Flow radiator, not cross flow.docbones - Friday, October 15, 2021 - link
Would love to see how it compares to the Ice Giant. (for noise and cooling)SuperMover - Saturday, October 16, 2021 - link
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Jasonovich - Monday, October 18, 2021 - link
Be Quiet! Pure Loop 280 cooler looks aesthetically pleasing but where's the RGB. Not asking disco but customised cases have to look good looking into the window.Off the subject, Noctua the pinnacle manufacturers of coolers, why don't they do AIO?
ltkAlpha - Tuesday, October 19, 2021 - link
A must-have feature that I'm looking for in AIOs is the ability to link fan speed to water temperature, as you don't need to hear the fans spin up over every load spike - they do so very gradually with load. I would go so far as to say that with AIOs, for the vast majority of people, that's the key differentiating feature of water cooling. Unfortunately most reviewers completely ignore the presence of the feature (curiously, many of the brands don't actively market the feature either), so benchmark results end up being of limited usefulness to me, since a) I don't care how an AIO sounds @100% fan speed - I want to know how loud they are when temperatures stabilize at a given CPU wattage and b) I don't care about half of the products presented, so to me the comparisons are apples to oranges.Keljian - Saturday, December 4, 2021 - link
There are two brands that I know of that have this feature, Corsair and nxzt. Interestingly though the fluctuation in temperature of coolant (the band of high/low) is not big, maybe 20C or so.I actually have a thermal probe on the top fin of my D15 and the max temp when the cpu is going ballistic is about 35C or so at 20C ambient. The cpu (overclocked) however is up around 80C. I have found that having the fan ramp up for more airflow doesn’t actually make a huge difference to the temp either, some airflow is good, but it caps out pretty quickly.