Be Quiet! Light Loop 360mm review

With a few generations of AIO liquid coolers under its belt, Be Quiet! has done pretty well in balancing cooling, aesthetics, noise and price, usually focussing on low noise and RGB-less designs. As RGB lighting has become more popular, though, it’s had to relent and add it to their coolers even if it’s done so in limited fashion. That changes with the Light Loop 360mm, which is the most illuminated Be Quiet! liquid cooler yet.

Thankfully, a lot of the great features of previous Be Quiet! coolers are still here. You get a trio of Be Quiet!’s own Light Wings LX fans and being best known for its fans and air coolers, you can all but guarantee these will be epic.

Here, they have 16 RGB LEDs embedded in the fan hub that radiate light outwards through nine semi-transparent fan blades. The fans themselves use rifle bearings and are 4-pin PWM-controlled, topping out at a reasonable 2,100 rpm.

You get screws for the included fans to mount them to the radiator, but sadly there’s no extras included to add your own should you want to boost cooling or lower noise at a later date as some other manufacturers allow. Our sample had all-black components, but there is a white version available if that’s more your thing. The actual illuminated sections are the pump top, which features a diagonal blade-like design, and the fan hubs and blades and both can display multiple colours simultaneously. The lighting is very punchy and vibrant and easily more appealing than that on Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III coolers.

The pump can spin up to 2,900 rpm, but as it has its own 4-pin PWM cable, it can be controlled separately. However, Be Quiet! has certainly been singing the pump’s new progressive motor IC in terms of reducing noise so hopefully running it at full speed won’t involve dealing with any hideous whining. Another noise-reducing feature we’ve seen on previous Be quiet! liquid coolers is the cooler’s ability to be refilled. Coolant can, over time, evaporate out of the sealed loop meaning air can be introduced, potentially increasing the noise in the pump.

A coolant bottle is included to top the coolant up should this happen, but should also mean the cooler can be installed in any orientation without fear of air getting into the pump if it’s higher than the radiator, which also acts as a reservoir, trapping any air in the loop. This is a well-known issue with long term use on standard liquid coolers, but so long as you top up the coolant here every year or so, the Light Loop 360mm should live a long and happy life in any position. The radiator itself is your standard thickness model, sitting at just 27 mm deep and 52 mm with the fans installed.

Unlike Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III coolers, which feature much thicker radiators, there should be no compatibility issues, even in cases with modest clearance around fan mounts. Arctic’s coolers also suffer from motherboard compatibility issues due to their large pumps and integrated VRM fans, but the Light Loop 360mm’s pump is very compact so we double any standard motherboard will struggle to house it.

While its fan and pump cables lack the brilliant pre-tidying of Arctic’s alternatives, Be Quiet! has at least included a fan and lighting hub that can combine all of the cooler’s cables into a single 3-pin ARGB and 4-pin PWM cables. This means you just need to route the cables behind your motherboard tray to the hub, rather than trailing across your motherboard, but we’d still rather see something more elaborate here from Be Quiet! in future.

The installation process is simple, although there’s a significant number of parts to deal with. Thankfully, you don’t need to remove the processor socket mechanism on Intel motherboards like you do with Arctic’s coolers and the pump itself attaches to mounting brackets you construct on the board using just two screws. On AMD Socket AM5 boards, the brackets allow for a slightly off-centre pump installation too, catering for Ryzen 7000 and 9000 processor hot spots that sit away from the centre point on the heatspreader.

The pump’s noise level was impressively low, only audible at full speed if you turn down all other system fans and put your ear within a foot of it so if you’re concerned about pump whine then we can highly recommend the Light Loop 360mm and that’s before playing around with the pump speed, which cut the noise even further. The fans, on the other hand, were not so quiet, adding a few decibels to the noise we’ve seen from coolers such as Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III 360 and definitely less pleasant to sit next to at full speed. Thankfully, as you edge away from full speed, the noise drops significantly and the noise quality improves so if you’re particularly noise-sensitive, we’d suggest limiting the fan speed to only hit 100% under extreme conditions.

There’s definitely scope to do this too as the Light Loop 360mm outperformed the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 in all of our tests and even once the ambient temperature was factored in, undercut the Arctic cooler by up to 5°C when pitched against our Core i7 14700K with a temperature of 77°C in our x264 test. It even shaved a few degrees of the temperature in our game test too and returned to idle temperatures far quicker as well.

Ultimately the Be Quiet! Light Loop 360mm is powerful, flexible, looks fantastic and its unique feature of being able to top up the coolant potentially means it has an extended lifespan compared to other coolers too. The negative points you’ll want to be aware of are relatively high noise levels from its fans at full speed and relatively high price in some areas for what is a fairly basic AIO liquid cooler in terms of not being software-controlled or having cable-free fans or other premium features. However, its excellent performance, good build quality and super-quiet pump go a long way to make up for this.