Thank you be quiet! for sending us this cooler to review!

be quiet! is a hardware company dealing in a variety of products typically with an aim to deliver quality products focusing on acoustic performance, while others like Noctua focus on delivering the absolute best performance and Thermalright focus on delivering the best value. The be quiet! Pure Loop 3 LX is a new 360mm liquid CPU cooler from the company with colorful LEDs on the fans and the pump mount. The cooler is said to be designed for performance with a focus on beautiful lighting, and the new, redesigned mount lets you insert decals over the faceplate to show cool designs illuminated by the LEDs. Most mounts with selectable designs nowadays only let you pick certain LED patterns or use small displays to show content, so using physical decals is an interesting idea.

The Pure Loop 3 LX comes in a well-packaged box with three of be quiet!’s Light Wing LX fans, a manual, 12 decals for the mount faceplate, different brackets for AMD and Intel CPUs, and screws for attaching the fans to the radiator and the radiator to the case. be quiet! recommended installing the fans in a push configuration, where air is pushed through the radiator out of the case, so I installed them as such and then screwed the radiator in place in my case. The bracket was easy to install on my AM4 motherboard, and installing the mount required only two screws that were easy to line up and tighten. All in all, the installation was far simpler than my prior Scythe Fuma 2, which will be my main comparison for this review.

The radiator is a fairly standard design, save for a nifty little feature: the ability to refill the radiator with fresh fluid. Fluid naturally evaporates from these closed systems AIOs (All-In-Ones), so this is a big plus for the longevity of the cooler. The decals you can put on the pump let you swap out designs as you like, since all you have to do is pop off a plastic cover and slide the piece inside. The fans have a sleek design with rounded corners and slight indentations on the center of the edges. This lets the fans look closer to a “bezel-less” design, so from the right angle they look like they’re almost floating thanks to the shape of the blades and the vibrant lights the LEDs produce. The fans also have be quiet!’s daisy chain connectors, which let you easily link the three fans together to occupy only one connection on your motherboard or fan controller.

Going from an air cooler to a liquid cooler, you'll naturally see much lower temperatures on your CPU and likely other components, as air is pushed through the radiator and out of the case, compared to an air cooler where the heat is circulated through the heatsink fins inside the case, thus recirculating hot air. I used Prime95 for a torture test on my 5700X3D and found that the Pure Loop was far more effective at managing temperatures. My old Scythe Fuma 2 couldn’t handle the max temps of my CPU, so it rose to its thermal limit of 90Cº in a few minutes as the heat spread across the heatsink, then stayed there for the remainder of the test. On the Pure Loop, temperature progress was mostly the same when comparing graphs, as the temperature on both slowly rose before hitting a max temperature around the same time. However, the Pure Loop 3 managed to keep the CPU around 79Cº at max fan speeds. This not only resulted in cooler temperatures, but also in better theoretical performance, as the CPU being thermally throttled on the Scythe caused it to lower its max clocks from 4GHz to around 3.7GHz, while the Pure Loop was able to keep the CPU close to its maximum by staying at 3.9Ghz for the rest of the test. Testing with Cinebench R24 I did manage to see a few points difference, but with such a minute difference in frequency this could easily have been run-to-run variance as well, and I’d not expect it to transfer much to gaming performance.

The biggest difference, however, was in noise. I’ve found that good air coolers, on average, are much quieter than an AIO. Whether this is due to cooler placement, the amount or type of fans used, or just how hard they must be driven, I don’t know, but I found it to be true in this case as well. The Scythe Fuma 2, at its max load with max fans during the torture test, produced around 40db of noise. The Pure Loop at max fans, however, produced 52db of noise. It was substantially louder than the rest of the components under load. Prime95 is a torture test and your CPU will rarely hit such sustained loads in games, meaning the Pure Loop had to work much harder than it would on average, but even so, the fact remains it was a fair bit noisier than my air cooler though with far better thermal performance.

All in all, the be quiet! Pure Loop 3 LX is a very beautiful liquid cooler with strong thermal performance, a nifty mount faceplate system, and the option to refill the radiator in the future. It still has the same drawbacks of all liquid coolers like noise and the possibility of damage if the liquid somehow leaks, and it is more expensive than similar performing options from companies like Thermalright and Arctic, some of which offer RGB as well, but if you have the budget for a nicer AIO, the Pure Loop 3 LX respects your dollar and gives you a quality, well-built product for your money.