be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm AIO Liquid Cooler Review

be quiet! is certainly a brand with an excellent reputation for the various high-quality products they bring to the market. Primarily dealing with power supplies, coolers, and cooling solutions, they are undoubtedly a name that carries a lot of respect within the hardware community, and, as a purchase, you should never fail to be impressed with the level of performance provided. With the launch of the brand new 'Pure Loop' AIO coolers, however, be quiet! believes that they really have something special here. Offering high-levels of CPU temperature control and (as their name might've suggested) low noise output, they certainly tick (at least in theory) two of the biggest boxes the savvy AIO consumer has! rbt be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm AIO Liquid Cooler With the Pure Loop range coming in radiator sizes between 120mm all the way up to 360mm, there is definitely a product to suit all needs and chassis designs here. Specifically for this review, however, we will be taking a closer look at the 240mm design. An excellent 'middle-of-the-road' design that should, all going well, give us the best of both worlds in terms of size and performance. Packing plenty of excellent features, we already have a pretty good idea that in terms of AIO coolers, this new design from be quiet! is going to be pretty good! Features Very high cooling performanceDoubly decoupled pump for quiet operation and minimal vibrationPure Wings 2 120mm PWM fans combine quiet operation with high air pressureWhite LED illumination, all-black design and aluminum-style for unmistakable and stylish lookEasy-to-access refill port and included coolant bottle guarantee a long lifespanFlexible sleeved tubes and a convenient mounting ensure easy handlingNickel-coated coldplate allows optimum use of liquid metal thermal compound3-year manufacturer’s warranty Technical Information For more in-depth specifications, please visit the official product page via the link here! Socket Compatibility What Does be quiet! Have To Say? "Pure Loop 240mm is the new very high-performing and silent All-in-One water cooling unit of be quiet! for price-conscious users with slightly overclocked systems.With Pure Loop even the most demanding applications can be used reliably. An immense cooling power provides low temperatures even during periods of peak CPU performance." Exterior Packaging The packaging carries all of the distinctive black with silver highlights design you'd fully expect from a be quiet! product. On the front, while the information provided is limited, you are given an excellent full-size view of the cooler that very quickly establishes what you can expect from this! hdr The rear and sides of the packaging go into detail surrounding the features, dimensions, and the level of performance the user should anticipate. While the writing is a little small, coming with nice and large images, it shouldn't take you more than a couple minutes to be fully familiar with this AIO cooler design. Accessories! As you might expect with an AIO cooler, there are more than a few different parts and accessories location within the box. Put simply though, with the only exception being a screwdriver, be quiet! has you well covered here! Additionally, and although we will go into more detail surrounding this in the 'installation' part of the review, we should note that be quiet! does supply you with a 4-pin cable splitter for the 2 x 120mm fans as well as also providing you with a SATA power connector for the pump heads lighting effects. A Closer Look Out of the box, the initial impressions of the Pure Loop 240mm are excellent. With it's sleek black design contrasted well against the silver pump head, it certainly gets off to a good start in terms of the aesthetics. Even when it's not quite yet fully assembled. While obviously being a little weighty in the hand, the be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm is actually quite pleasurable to handle with a solid weight balance between the pump head and the radiator. In addition, with the hose offering some good levels of flexibility, it's not awkward to move around or adjust either. Pump Head With it's black and silver design, the pump head is a little unusual in that the design is in something of an elongated square. While this is largely due to the installation method, it looks very slick and particularly so with the logo to the centre. The only mildly controversial point we would make is that it's hard to tell, looking at it below, that this does actually have some lighting effects. Trust us though, it does, and you'll see more of them later! Contact Plate The pump head is nice and large coming in a hexagonal style shape. With an amazingly polished surface as well, this should not only provide good contact with either Intel or AMD processors, but this should also provide some excellent levels of efficient heat transfer! Radiator The radiator for the Pure Loop 240mm is rather basic in that, as per the vast majority of AIO radiator designs, it's largely just a black rectangle. On the plus side, however, be quiet! has applied some minor branding to the side which is nice both in terms of punch and presentation. Hose Starting with one of the most practical aspects, the hose found on the be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm is of an exceptionally good length and is somewhat surprisingly malleable. Given that hose length can often restrict the radiators location within a chassis, or simply that the hose resistance makes installation difficult, be quiet! has provided what I can only call one of the best compromises to suit both of these factors exceptionally well. In addition, it should be noted that be quiet! has designed the Pure Loop to allow the potential for it to be an integrated part of an existing custom loop system. Through the bracket attachment, the hoses can be easily disconnected and hooked up to other components albeit, we should note, you don't have to do this, and to clarify 100%, this AIO cooler works perfectly independently out of the box. Fan As this is a 240mm AIO liquid cooler, it shouldn't come as any surprise to find that you are provided with 2 x 120mm cooling fans. Being be quiet! own 'Pure Wings 2' design, we have encountered these fans many times in the past and, putting the excellent aesthetics to one side, we have never failed to be impressed with the amazingly low acoustic performance they provide. Overall Taking the design as a whole and individually, the be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm looks to be a truly excellent AIO liquid cooler. There is literally nothing we can fault with this design in its appearance and, as we alluded to earlier in the review, with be quiet! seemingly being more than a little pleased with themselves here, everything we have seen so far has us concurring with that. We do, however, need to address an elephant in the room here regarding be quiet! coolers. Put simply, based on a number of their other earlier products, they are a manufacturer with a reputation for having something of a difficult installation process. So, is that the case here? Well, there's only one way to find out! Installation Starting with one of the most fundamental aspects, and an aspect that everyone should start with, the manual provided with the Pure Loop is excellent both in terms of the information provided and it's quality. Coming with a lot of written information, as well as many useful diagrams, while it does take a little reading, be quiet! has ensured that as long as you're paying attention, you shouldn't have any difficulties along the way. As something of a very minor criticism, the vast majority of parts for this AIO cooler are contained within sealed plastic bags. Put simply, once they're open, you don't have anywhere left to put the parts you either didn't need or accidentally opened up. It's a small grumble, put I wish be quiet! had included resealable bags here because when it came to us putting this all back in the box following our testing, we largely had no option but to stick everything in the 1-2 big resealable bags they did provide. Something that would clearly make the process more difficult the next time we (or someone else) came to use this cooler. With that being said, there are many other aspects that easily outweigh this gripe. For example, the be quiet Pure Loop 240 comes complete with a surprisingly generous amount of 'top-up' fluid for the cooler. As you may be aware, over time (and we're talking years) AIO systems do eventually begin to lose a little of the liquid and, as such, while the Pure Loop 240mm is perfectly ready to rock out of the box, it's really fantastic that be quiet! has thought about the long-term usage here. Finally, although you are provided with some thermal paste within a tube, as you can see below, it's not exactly an overly generous portion. Put simply, while you certainly have enough for 1 (and maybe 2) applications here, if you're new to AIO cooler installations, you might just want to have a bit of extra thermal compound on hand as, if you get it wrong on the first installation, you might not quite have enough here for the second. Mounting In terms of the mounting system, the good news is be quiet! has chosen a system that, although having it's mildly fiddly moments, is certainly not difficult and, based on the excellent instructions, is certainly more than easy to understand. The only we encountered was when we went to switch our test bench on. Seeing a boot loop, this is nearly always indicative that the cooler hasn't made good contact with the processor. So, a second check found that despite the mounting system 'feeling' tight, there was still apparently another 2-3 twists of a screw driver to get this down correctly. So, in brief, you have to attach the mounting bracket quite firm and perhaps a little more than a number of people would feel entirely comfortable with. Once done, however, it ran absolutely perfectly on the second attempt. Overall Thoughts From out of the box and onto our test bench, the be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm took us roughly 20 minutes to install. It would've been about 10-15, but we probably spent at least 5 trying to figure out why it was boot-looping. With that minor aspect out of the way, however, the good news is that unlike some prior be quiet! coolers, this isn't actually that difficult to install. Yes, there are parts of it that are fiddly work for fat hands, but on the whole, be you new or experienced in AIO coolers, you shouldn't have any problems fitting this to your system. And, we should add, with that lighting in effect, the pump head actually looks pretty damn cool! Test System & Methodology As you may appreciate, we review a lot of coolers here at eTeknix. As such, our prior results sheet was getting more than a little crowded. We have, therefore, applied a new system in which we have picked those coolers we consider most popular or most relevant to this design. Please note that we re-tested the Noctua NH-D15S as our base benchmark for cooling results. Test system: Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9 Z270Intel Core i7-7700K Delidded w/ NT-H1 under IHSRadeon R7 Passive GPU with 2GB VRAM16GB Crucial DDR4 2400 MHz (only swapped to 8GB in the unlikely event of RAM compatibility issues) - If this has been done, it will be noted within the review!512GB OCZ SSDbe quiet! Dark Power Pro 800WLian Li T80 Test BenchAll testing conducted using NT-H1 thermal paste We’d like to say a big thank you to Gigabyte, Noctua, Crucial, Intel, OCZ, be quiet!, and Lian Li for providing us with the above testing equipment and their on-going support. Testing Methodology We always use Noctua Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste to make sure testing reveals the efficiency of the tested coolers not the efficiency of the bundled thermal pastePrime 95 is run for 10 minutes to calculate "load" resultsUnigine Superposition is run for 10 minutes to calculate "gaming" resultsThe average temperature across all cores is takenFans are left to operate at default PWM profile speeds unless otherwise statedFor water cooling tests, all pumps have been operated at 12 volts unless otherwise statedAmbient temperatures should be between 21-23 degrees in all our tests unless otherwise statedAcoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally and 10cm vertically away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabledStock tests are performed using "out of the box" settings for the CPUOverclocking tests are performed with the CPU set to 5 GHz and 1.345vAll coolers were tested under identical settings unless otherwise stated.There is approximately a 1-degree Celsius margin of error in our temperature recording software CPUID HW MonitorThere is approximately a 1.5dBA margin of error with our Benetech GM1351 decibel meterIn all these graphs we may have a few "reference" results of particular products that do not fit within that category for comparative purposes. Software Used CPUID HWMonitorPrime 95Unigine Superposition (1080 Extreme) Performance Without a doubt, both in terms of temperature control and acoustic performance, the be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm is one of the best coolers we have ever tested. As you can see in our results below, it's nearly top (or bottom depending on how you look at it) on every single test we conducted and this also includes overclocking where it easily handled the extra heat generated without presenting even the mildest hint of concerns in terms of performance and hardly a whisper in terms of acoustics. This isn't just good, it's truly excellent and it makes the be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm AIO one of the best coolers I've encountered so far this year! I honest can't overstate just how impressed at how well this performed! Stock Temperatures Stock Acoustics Overclocked Temperatures Overclocked Acoustics How Much Does it Cost? Although the be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm AIO hasn't quite hit retailers yet (at least, not at the time of writing) we have been informed that this cooler will retail for a price in the region of £92.99. In comparative terms, while certainly more expensive than entry-level designs, with the quality and performance on offer here, you might be surprised to find that this still remains surprisingly less expensive (by around £20-£30 in some cases) than much of it's performance relative competition. Overview Right at the beginning of this review, we suggested that although not releasing with a particularly large amount of fanfare, be quiet! was seemingly somewhat pleased with what they had achieved here with the Pure Loop design. Now that we've had a look at the cooler components and test results, although I always suspected that the Pure Loop 240mm was always going to be very good, even I'll admit that this was massively better than even my wildest expectations. The build quality is absolutely flawless and, as you saw in our test results, this is one of the best AIO liquid coolers we have ever had the pleasure of encountering. And not just in temperature control either, this managed to keep our processor amazingly cool while barely producing a whisper. Throw in those lighting effects to the pump head, which certain add an extra dimension to the aesthetics while almost surely not putting off even the ardent of RGB haters, and we have a truly amazing product here. Should I Buy One? With more people becoming tempted to transition to AIO liquid cooling, the be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm is an absolutely amazing product not only in terms of it's build quality and performance, but also through the fact that through it's design, be quiet! has opened up the doors for this to be a perfect addition to an elaborate custom-loop cooling system while still making it a fantastic choice as a stand-alone solution. I run the risk of waxing lyrical here, but in terms of 2020 and indeed recent memory, this is undoubtedly one of the best AIO coolers I have encountered providing you with truly fantastic levels of both temperature and acoustic control while at a surprisingly reasonable, and dare we say bargain, price! - Lest we forget too, it manages to do all that while, with its strong aesthetics, looking really slick while doing so! - Put simply, if I needed a new cooler, right now, this is the one I would buy! Pros Amazingly strong temperature controlBarely audible, even when the CPU is running at high loadsEntirely 100% viable for overclocking either individually or as an integrated part of a custom-loop design.Strong aesthetics that should suit all tastesFantastic value for money! Cons None Neutral The installation is still a little tricky, but be quiet! is getting better! be quiet! Pure Loop 240mm AIO Liquid Cooler Review