BeQuiet! 2002–2022 and this is not an obituary, production is not slowing down
Do you know what first carried the BeQuiet! logo? It wasn’t a cooler, it wasn’t a fan, it wasn’t a PSU, and it wasn’t a case. These components were added to the portfolio only later. BeQuiet! started on something completely different, relatively simpler. Over time, however, the range of components has grown considerably. Let’s take a look at what the company has been gradually getting up to.
Disclaimer: This article is part of a paid collaboration on the BeQuiet! banner campaign. However, Listan (the company that owns the BeQuiet! brand) did not interfere with the text in any way and only commissioned us to develop and publish an article on the topic of their 20th anniversary.
The BeQuiet! brand was founded in 2001 to manufacture and market computer components optimized for ultra-quiet operation. And indeed it was. BeQuiet! has stuck to conservative speeds in fans for a very long time. Thus, in terms of maximum performance, coolers and fans often lagged behind the competition, but once comparable conditions with the same noise level were established, there weren’t many competing solutions that offered higher cooling performance. But that’s digressing a bit from the timeline.
The first ever BeQuiet! product did not create any noise and, on the contrary, absorbed the sound of other components. It was a set of soundproofing panels. These made sense at the time (2002) mainly for damping platter drives, but naturally they are also useful for damping graphics card coils and fans. The sound suppression panel kit from BeQuiet! is still available today. In a slightly different package, slightly differently constructed, but you can still wallpaper your case with them.
BeQuiet! releases its first more complex product in 2003, the 450-watt Blackline P4 power supply, which used two fans for cooling. One as an intake and the other as an exhaust (at the back, near the power connector and power switch). A year later BeQuiet! expands to the Asian market and opens a branch in Poland.
In 2007, Listan started to focus more on its own product development at the expense of distribution activities, culminating in the release of the first Silent Wings fan (2009). This later became the basis of cooling for power supplies and heatsinks that depended on active cooling. These included the Dark Rock Advanced and Dark Rock Pro CPU coolers, i.e. single-tower and twin-tower heatpipe coolers.These came to the market in 2010, when we were slowly starting to build a large comparison database of cooler tests on ExtraHardware.cz.
Another milestone was the first BeQuiet! case in 2014 – the Silent Base 800. Although in the meantime many BeQuiet! power supplies were also released, it can be said that the production was rather slower in order to achieve the highest quality features. Finally (after power supplies, fans, coolers and cases) comes (2016) a fifth product category – AIO Silent Loop liquid coolers. And again, it’s a bit different than the then mainstream water cooler look. Aside from the efficient fans (Silent Wings 2 back then) BeQuiet! was one of the few to use a copper radiator (most competitors were using aluminum) to eliminate galvanic corrosion.
The company reached two million sales between 2018–2019, when it also enters the North American market. Now, BeQuiet! already has more than 100 employees, which is really quite a lot considering the nature of the business. After all, cooling components and with an emphasis on high quality features are not exactly what a consumer society craves for on a daily basis.
Anyway, BeQuiet! is still growing and in 2020 the headquarters (management) is moving to bigger premises for capacity reasons, but it is still in Germany (Glinde, a smaller town near Hamburg). In this period, following the Silent Loop liquid coolers, cheaper Pure Loop solutions are also coming out.
In 2021, the company’s annual turnover reaches 125 million EUR and a few ARGB LED lighting components are already on offer. BeQuiet! has avoided the first generation of RGB LEDs (with 12 V analogue power supply), but now it is already riding the wave and after the launch of Light Wings fans, many cases and coolers are “lighting up” – proven designs that have the FX designation. This is also the case with the Pure Base 500 FX (its DX variant, with orange mask illumination, can also be found in our tests). SSD coolers (MC1 and MC1 Pro) are also set to debut in Q1 2021, with a detailed HWC analysis scheduled for the coming days.
The whole range of Pure Loop 2 (FX) liquid coolers and traditional Pure Rock 2 (FX) air coolers have also undergone a transformation and mainly a fan replacement (for Light Wings). BeQuiet! However, it doesn’t only “innovate” effects, but also efficiency. After all, you’ve read our analysis of the latest product – the Silent Wings (Pro) 4 fans.
On its website, BeQuiet! is also running a contest for a bunch of different components. You can take part until 30 September 2022. You can do this by answering a very simple question, namely: what was the first BeQuiet! electrical device?
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
