be quiet! Silent Loop 280mm AIO CPU Cooler Review

Performance

The be quiet! Silent Loop absolutely decimated the heat from the CPU, clocking some of our lowest ever temperatures at just +2c idle and +21c load, which is what we hoped for given the size of the radiator and the high-end build quality.

While overclocked, the be quiet! Silent Loop 280 didn’t perform as well as we had hoped, but that’s not to say it did poorly, far from it. At just +44c over ambient, the 280 is doing a great job at giving us perfectly stable performance while overclocking and we would be happy to run our system at this level 24/7 with no concern. As you can see it’s on par with many other high-quality coolers, but there’s one more trick that makes these numbers even more impressive.

At stock temperatures the Silent Loop is virtually silent, only 1dBa from the quietest coolers we’ve ever tested and on par with a range of air coolers from Noctua, which is mighty impressive; you’ll never hear this cooler at this level!

This is where things get really impressive, the quietest water cooler we’ve ever tested while overclocked! At just 39dBa the Silent Loop could only be heard with your ear next to it, there’s a tiny mechanical noise from the pump which can only be heard with your ear a few inches away from it, there was no water bubbling noises and the fans weren’t exactly working hard either. We tried re-testing with the fans set to turbo, and even then they maxed out at 42dBa, and the temperatures dropped 2c, but I’d take the silent performance over the louder fans all day long.