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be quiet! Silent Loop 360 AIO CPU Cooler Review

A Closer Look

The first thing you’ll want to have a look at is the water block and radiator. For the 360 cooler, this is, after all, one of the main features you purchased it for. With the water block in a black gloss finish and the radiator in a matt-black finish, both look very stylish and highly presentable. In addition, the hose cables are very strong and coated with a protective sleeve to ensure no damage or pinching could possibly happen.

The hose is a little bit stiff which is something we have come to know with be quiet! products. As such, it isn’t the most ‘flexible’ you can work with and in these cases it’s often best to ensure you fit the radiator (with the fans of course) before the water block. With a product this bulky as well, it just tends to make sense.

The water block is a nice solid square design and looks very sturdy. The large contact plate should give excellent CPU coverage. In regards to the photo as well, no, that is not an illusion, we took is specifically to shot the microscopic contours of the cooler plate surface which should allow for optimal heat dissipation. In addition, as noted above, you can see the clips which in this instance is holding the Intel socket in place. This has slid in from either side and interlocks to the center.

If at this point you are worried about getting those apart, don’t. I’ve already tried it and while it does require a little strength, it’s not overly difficult and certainly not impossible.

When fitted to the motherboard you have a nice solid design that looks bold and professional. The be quiet! logo particularly is a nice touch with it being nice, bold and clear without it being obtrusive. As this cooler doesn’t have any RGB lighting, this is about as gaudy as it gets for the be quiet! Silent Loop 360.

When it’s all put together you get a rather sleek design and those be quiet! fans with the Silent Wing blades look truly excellent. If you are therefore looking for style and design with no signs of RGB lighting anywhere, the be quiet! Silent Loop 360 certainly meets the mark.

When it’s all put together, it’s hard to deny that this is a stylish looking CPU cooler.

Fans and Radiator

The cooler comes pre-supplied with 3 cooler fans. These carry the ‘Silent Wings’ technology which is designed to give optimal airflow while keeping noise to a minimum. In terms of looks, these are certainly fantastic looking.

The 9 blades with the contoured tips, while supposed to promote high air and low noise, simply look great. It’s a little touch as well, but I always like that be quiet! take the effort to ensure that the stickers are all placed in the same place. Therefore, when the cooler is off, or if you’re just looking to take a snazzy photo to show it off to your friends, they all match the same direction.

When mounted to the cooler and running, it certainly looks an impressive performer. This does, however, lead to one of the criticisms of the 3 fan system. There are a lot of cables. I would really like to see this design use some form of a piggyback system. With three full-length cables, it’s going to be a little challenge to keep them tidy.

Admittedly the below is not the tidiest photo, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what this looks like. In addition, the 3 slot adaptor provided by be quiet! is quite short, as such, going off whats in the box, you are going to at least have these 3 cables leading mostly up to the motherboard.

Test System and Methodology

Please note that our testing system was completely revised in September 2017. That means all previous results have been scrapped, and a new set of benchmarks introduced. For a look at our previous reviews, please consult our most recent review that used that system. Please note that we re-tested the Noctua NH-D15S as our base benchmark for cooling results.

Test system:

Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9 Z270
Intel Core i7-7700K Delidded w/ NT-H1 under IHS
Radeon Passive R7 Graphics Card
32GB Crucial DDR4 2400 MHz
512GB OCZ SSD
be quiet! Dark Power Pro 800W
Lian Li T80 Test Bench
All 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 paste
Prime 95 is run for 10 minutes to calculate “load” results
Unigine Superposition is run for 10 minutes to calculate “gaming” results
The average temperature across all cores is taken
Fans are left to operate at default PWM profile speeds unless otherwise stated
For water cooling tests, all pumps have been operated at 12 volts unless otherwise stated
Ambient temperatures should be between 21-23 degrees in all our tests unless otherwise stated
Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally and 10cm vertically away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled
Stock tests are performed using “out of the box” settings for the CPU
Overclocking tests are performed with the CPU set to 5 GHz and 1.345v
All 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 Monitor
There is approximately a 1.5dBA margin of error with our Benetech GM1351 decibel meter
In all these graphs we may have a few “reference” results of particular products that do not fit within that category for comparative purposes.