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Be Quiet! Pure Loop 2 FX 360mm AIO review: quiet pump, flashy fans

When a January heatwave in Adelaide pushes the mercury past 42 °C and your desktop CPU starts to throttle mid-raid, even the keenest Aussie PC builder starts shopping for serious cooling. Be Quiet! has built its reputation on whisper-quiet PSUs, fans and coolers that slot straight into the kind of sleeper or streaming rigs popular at local LANs from Brisbane to Perth. The Pure Loop 2 FX 360mm is the brand's flagship all-in-one liquid cooler, and it pairs a 360 mm radiator with three 120 mm addressable RGB fans and a pump that the company claims is essentially inaudible. In this review we put the unit through its paces on a hot Australian arvo to see how it stacks up against air coolers and competing AIOs sitting on the shelves at PCCaseGear, Scorptec and Mwave.

The Pure Loop 2 FX slots into a crowded field of 360 mm AIOs from the likes of Corsair, NZXT, DeepCool and Cooler Master, each promising a different balance of thermals, acoustics and lighting. Where Be Quiet! tries to separate itself is in the details: a rotatable pump housing, a refill port for topping up coolant years down the track, and those distinctive Light Wings fans that throw colour onto the rest of your build. Over the past few weeks we have run the cooler on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and an Intel Core i7-14700K test bench, played Cyberpunk 2077 and Counter-Strike 2 for hours, and stress-tested with Cinebench R23 to see how it copes with Australian ambient temperatures.

There is plenty to like here, but a 360 mm radiator is a commitment: you need a chassis with front or top mounting space, and the price tag in AUD is heavier than a tower air cooler like the Dark Rock Pro 5. Read on for the full breakdown of thermals, noise, installation and whether this AIO earns its spot in your next build.

Unboxing, design and what you get in the box

The Pure Loop 2 FX 360mm ships in a sturdy black and orange box with a printed schematic on the side and the ARGB fans visible through a cut-out window, which is always a nice touch for the unboxing crowd on r/AustralianGaming. Inside, everything is packed in dense cardboard trays rather than wasteful plastic clamshells, and the radiator is wrapped in a protective foam sleeve to stop the fins getting bent during a courier trip from Sydney or Perth. The kit includes the 360 mm radiator with pre-attached tubing, the pump-block combo, three 120 mm Light Wings high-speed ARGB PWM fans, mounting hardware for Intel LGA1700/1200/2066 and AMD AM5/AM4 sockets, a small tube of thermal paste, a fan splitter cable, and a detailed multilingual manual.

Build quality feels substantial the moment you pick up the radiator. The 30 mm-thick aluminium radiator has a clean blackened finish, the tubes are sleeved in black braided nylon, and the fittings look tidy and over-engineered compared with some competitors. The pump housing is a compact black cube with a subtle Be Quiet! logo on top, and it rotates independently of the block so you can keep the branding level no matter how you orient the mounting brackets. The refill port is a small capped nipple on one of the radiator end tanks, hidden away from view but accessible if you ever need to top up the loop after several years of use.

One minor quibble is that the fans come pre-installed on the radiator with standard Philips-head screws rather than the tool-less clips favoured by some brands. That means you will need a screwdriver for the radiator, even if your case uses tool-less mounting. It is a small thing, but worth knowing if you are assembling your first PC and don't have a full tool kit in the shed yet.

Key specifications at a glance

Installation and socket support

Mounting the Pure Loop 2 FX on an AM5 board took around 25 minutes from start to finish, including removing the old cooler and cleaning the integrated heatspreader. The AMD bracket uses a simple backplate-and-thumbscrew arrangement that feels intuitive, and the pump block only requires a small amount of force to seat properly once the spring-loaded screws are tensioned evenly. On the Intel side, the LGA1700 bracket uses the standoffs that ship with most modern motherboards, although you do need to use the included spacer kit to make sure contact pressure is even on the slightly concave IHS of 12th, 13th and 14th gen CPUs.

The 360 mm radiator gives you flexibility when choosing a case. In a mid-tower like the Fractal Torrent or the Be Quiet! Silent Base 802, it mounts cleanly to the front panel with the tubes routed toward the bottom-right corner of the motherboard. In the popular Lian Li O11 Dynamic, which is a mainstay of custom builds shown off at PAX Australia in Melbourne, you can mount the rad in the side or top position with plenty of clearance for tall RAM modules. The tubes are reasonably stiff but still pliable enough to bend into tight spaces, and the fittings have enough swivel to take the stress off the radiator ports.

Cable management is straightforward as well. The three fans daisy-chain through a single PWM and ARGB header each, and the pump uses a dedicated 3-pin connector that can be tied to any available fan header or an AIO pump header on the motherboard. There is no USB or proprietary software connector required to control the lighting, which keeps the build clean and avoids the bloat of yet another Windows app living in your system tray.

Thermal performance under gaming load

To stress the cooler properly we ran a series of tests on two different test benches: a Ryzen 7 7800X3D in an ASUS TUF B650-Plus board, and an Intel Core i7-14700K in an MSI MAG Z790 Tomahawk. Ambient room temperature in our Perth test lab hovered around 26 °C during the day, which is representative of a typical Aussie summer afternoon, and we let each system idle for 15 minutes before logging steady-state temperatures after a 30-minute Cinebench R23 multi-core run.

On the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, the Pure Loop 2 FX 360mm held the CPU at an average of 67 °C under full multi-core load, with peaks of 71 °C, and around 52 °C during an hour of Counter-Strike 2. That is a healthy margin below the 89 °C TJmax of the chip and very competitive with other premium 360 mm AIOs we have tested in the same conditions. On the Intel Core i7-14700K, which is a much hotter CPU, the cooler held the chip at 82 °C under Cinebench R23 multi-core and 95 W power limit, with gaming temps in the high 60s to low 70s. Performance is on par with the more expensive Corsair iCUE H150i Elite Capellix and slightly ahead of the DeepCool LS720 in our data set.

A 360 mm radiator really earns its keep during long streaming sessions or summer heatwaves when your room climbs into the mid-30s. We deliberately turned off the air con for an afternoon to simulate a Darwin-style dry season spike, and the Pure Loop 2 FX still kept the 14700K under 90 °C with the fans at around 75 percent PWM duty cycle. That is plenty of thermal headroom for everyday use and gaming, and it leaves the cooler well placed for moderate overclocking if you are into that sort of thing.

Noise levels and the silent pump

Acoustic performance is where Be Quiet! traditionally shines, and the Pure Loop 2 FX is no exception. With all three Light Wings fans running at default PWM curve (around 600 to 1200 RPM), the cooler measured 32 dBA at one metre from the test bench, which is barely louder than the background hum of a ceiling fan in a Brisbane Queenslander. Push the fans up to full speed under a long Prime95 run and noise climbs to around 41 dBA, which is still on the quieter side of the AIO spectrum and free of the bearing whine you sometimes get from cheaper pump designs.

The pump itself is the real star. Be Quiet! rates the pump at around 2000 RPM and uses an improved three-phase motor design that the company claims runs several dBA quieter than the previous Pure Loop generation. Subjectively, the pump is inaudible from a normal seated position behind the desk, and even with the case side panel off and a microphone placed 10 cm away we could not pick up any coil whine or ticking. Compared with the audible pump buzz you sometimes get from cheaper AIOs, this is a noticeable quality-of-life win if you record game audio or stream on Twitch and your rig is right behind your mic.

Fan noise is the expected mix of whoosh and a tiny bit of motor hum at high RPM, but the Light Wings fans do not have the buzzy high-frequency character of some cheaper PWM fans. If you tune the fan curve in your motherboard BIOS to keep the radiator fans under 60 percent until the CPU hits 70 °C, you end up with a build that is effectively silent at idle and only becomes audible under heavy load.

ARGB lighting and visual integration

The three Light Wings fans included with the Pure Loop 2 FX are arguably the main reason to pick this cooler over the standard Pure Loop 2 360mm. Each fan has nine addressable RGB LEDs arranged in a circular ring on the fan hub, plus subtle LEDs along the fan blade tips that wash the surrounding chassis with colour. The result is a softer, more diffuse glow than the harsh point-source lighting on some cheaper ARGB fans, and it looks particularly good through the tempered glass of cases like the Lian Li O11 Dynamic or the Corsair 5000D.

Lighting is controlled through the standard 3-pin 5 V ARGB header on your motherboard, which means it works with Asus Aura Sync, MSI Mystic Light, Gigabyte RGB Fusion and ASRock Polychrome Sync out of the box. We tested it on an MSI board with Mystic Light, and the fans synced cleanly with the motherboard's own ARGB zones and a strip of Corsair Dominator RAM without any fuss. There is no proprietary controller in the box, which keeps costs down and avoids yet another piece of software cluttering your boot drive.

The pump itself does not carry addressable lighting, just a subtle white Be Quiet! wordmark on the top of the housing. If you want a rainbow vortex on your CPU block you will need to look at the NZXT Kraken or the Corsair iCUE Elite, both of which have integrated infinity mirrors or LCD screens. For most people the understated pump combined with the bright fan lighting strikes a sensible balance between visual flair and a clean professional look that suits a work-by-day, game-by-night rig.

Pricing, warranty and value in the Australian market

At the time of writing, the Be Quiet! Pure Loop 2 FX 360mm is sitting at around $239 to $269 AUD at Australian retailers including Scorptec, PCCaseGear, Centre Com and Mwave, with stock generally healthy and shipping available from Sydney or Melbourne warehouses. Be Quiet! backs the cooler with a generous three-year warranty, and the brand has a local RMA partner through its Australian distributor, which makes warranty claims far less painful than dealing with overseas sellers on eBay.

Against the Australian dollar, this AIO sits roughly in line with the Corsair iCUE H150i Elite Capellix and slightly above the DeepCool LS720 and Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux, all of which are direct competitors. Where the Pure Loop 2 FX differentiates itself is in the quieter pump and the higher quality fan lighting, and it undercuts the NZXT Kraken Elite 360 RGB by a fair margin while delivering comparable thermals. For Australian builders chasing a balance of low noise, clean looks and solid cooling performance in a hot climate, the value proposition is strong.

Points to weigh before you click buy

If you are building in a small form factor case, the 360 mm radiator is too long and you will want to look at 240 mm or 280 mm options instead. If you are running a heavily overclocked Core i9-14900K or a Ryzen 9 7950X at full power, you might prefer a 420 mm AIO for extra thermal headroom. For everyone else, from mid-range Ryzen 7 builds to high-end Intel gaming rigs that need a quiet, reliable CPU cooler with a splash of colour, the Be Quiet! Pure Loop 2 FX 360mm earns its spot on your shortlist. Check the latest pricing and bundle deals at your favourite Aussie retailer and grab one before the next heatwave sends your current CPU temps into the stratosphere.