Be still! 360mm Light Loop Review

With several generations of AIO liquid coolers under its belt, Be Quiet! does a pretty good job of balancing cooling, aesthetics, noise, and price, usually focusing on low-noise, non-RGB designs. However, as RGB lighting became more and more popular, you had to relent and add it to your refrigerators, even if it was done in a circumscribed way. That changes with the Light Loop 360mm, which is the most illuminated Be Quiet model! also a liquid cooler.

Fortunately, many of the great features of the previous Be Quiet! the coolers are still here. You get three Light Wings LX fans from Be Quiet!, and being best known for their fans and air coolers, you can almost guarantee that they will be epic.

Here they have 16 RGB LEDs embedded in the fan hub that emit lightweight outwards through nine translucent fan blades. The fans themselves exploit rifle bearings and are controlled by 4-pin PWM, reaching a maximum speed of 2100 rpm.

The kit includes screws for the included fans, allowing you to mount them to the radiator, but unfortunately there are no extras included that you can add yourself if you want to boost cooling or lower noise levels in the future, as some other manufacturers allow. Our sample featured all-black components, but a white version is also available if that’s more your style. The actual illuminated sections are the top of the pump, which has a diagonal blade-like design, and the hubs and blades of the fan, both of which can display multiple colors at once. The lighting is very mighty and bright, and much more attractive than in Arctic Liquid Freezer III refrigerators.

The pump can spin at up to 2,900 rpm, but thanks to its own 4-pin PWM cable, it can be controlled separately. However, be still! certainly praises the modern, progressive pump motor IC in terms of noise reduction, so hopefully running it at full speed won’t involve any awful whining. Another noise-cancelling feature we saw in the previous Be Quiet! Liquid coolers mean that the radiator can be refilled. Coolant can evaporate from the sealed loop over time, which can cause air to enter, which can boost pump noise.

A coolant bottle is included to enable you to top up the coolant in such a case, but this should also mean that the radiator can be installed in any orientation without fear of air getting into the pump if it is positioned higher than the radiator which is running also as a reservoir, trapping any air in the loop. This is a well-known problem with long-term exploit of standard liquid coolers, but if you top up the coolant here every year or so, the Light Loop 360mm should live a long and ecstatic life in any position. The radiator itself is a standard thickness model, measuring just 27mm deep and 52mm with fans installed.

Unlike Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III coolers, which feature much thicker heatsinks, there should be no compatibility issues, even with a petite gap around the fan mount. Arctic refrigerators also have motherboard compatibility issues due to their huge pumps and integrated VRM fans, but the Light Loop 360mm pump is very compact, so doubling the standard motherboard will be challenging to accommodate it.

Although fan and pump wiring does not provide as great pre-conditioning as Arctic alternatives, Be Quiet! at least it includes a fan and a lighting hub that can combine all the cooler cables into one 3-pin ARGB and 4-pin PWM cable. This means you just need to run the cables behind the motherboard bay into the hub rather than through the motherboard, but we’d still prefer to see something more complicated than Be Quiet here! from this moment on.

The installation process is straightforward, although there are a significant number of parts to take care of. Fortunately, there is no need to remove the processor socket mechanism on Intel motherboards, as is the case with Arctic coolers, and the pump itself is attached to mounting brackets constructed on the board with just two screws. For AMD socket AM5 boards, the brackets also allow the pump to be installed slightly off-center, supporting the warm spots of Ryzen 7000 and 9000 processors, which are located away from the central point of the heat spreader.

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The pump noise level was impressively low, only audible at full speed if you turn down all the other system fans and put your ear a step closer to them. If you’re concerned about pump whine, we can highly recommend the Light Loop 360mm, and that’s all before you start playing around with the pump speed, which will cut down on the noise even more. The fans, on the other hand, weren’t quite as still, adding a few decibels to the noise we’ve seen with coolers like Arctic’s Liquid Freezer III 360 and definitely less pleasant to sit next to at full speed. Fortunately, as you move away from full speed, the noise drops significantly and the sound quality improves, so if you’re particularly sensitive to noise, we suggest limiting the fan speed to 100% only in extreme conditions.

This is definitely a possibility, as the Light Loop 360mm outperformed the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 in all of our tests, and even after accounting for ambient temperature, the ambient temperature dropped by up to 5°C compared to our Core i7 14700K at 77°C in our x264 test. In our play test, it even lowered the temperature by a few degrees and returned to idle temperatures much faster.

Ultimately, Be Quiet! The Light Loop 360mm is mighty, elastic, looks fantastic and its unique coolant refill feature potentially means it has a longer lifespan compared to other coolers. Negative points worth being aware of include the relatively high noise level produced by the fans at full speed and the relatively high price in some areas for a fairly basic AIO liquid cooler in terms of lacking software control or having cable-free fans or other premium features. However, its excellent performance, good build quality and extremely still pump make up for this to a huge extent.