Hey guys welcome back to ComputerWorld, Today we're going to focus on the cooler we have which was the Thermaltake contac silent 12. Now it's Thermaltakes basic entry into the CPU cooler tower design and it is right out of the box aim for compatible which is why I selected it for our under 30 review So before we go any further let's tell you an overview of what the cooler has to offer us. So once again it's a classic tower style design now we have four copper six millimeter heat pipes helping us out to cool the CPU and paired with that is an aluminum thin stack. We have a 120 millimeter fan which is PWM compatible and theoretically it has a max rpm of only 1,500. The dimensions around on the cooler are 153 millimeters high by 127 millimeters wide and 75.3 millimeters deep. The cooler is rated by thermaltake for up to 150 watts TDP and as I said earlier it's compatible with all modern sockets with an AM for directly out of the box there's no upgrade kit needed and there's no worries to be had on that end before we get any further and we look at the performance design.
There
is an extra thing that comes with our Thermaltake contac silent 12 which is what they call the
LNC or Low Noise Connector. Now basically honestly what it actually all is an
extra resistance that you can put between the fan cable and your header which
basically lowers the RPM of the fan. So even if max rather than spinning about
1500 rpm I'm not mistaken the fan will go down to about 1100 rpm and it's
actually an interesting add-on here. Because this is really where the cooler
gets its silent name from with which is this little add-on here that they
include with the cooler and what we're going to do today contrary to usual is
we're actually going to test the cooler in both modes see how much cooling performance
we lose by using LNC and at the same time however how much quieter we can get
the fan because I always test my fans locked at 100%. So with the LNC we're going
to see that if we lock our system at 100% are we actually getting a much
quieter the fan out of it. So before we get on to the numbers really quickly,
let's go over how exactly I do my testing so all my testing was done on my
horizon 3 open-air test bench D CPU is overclocked to 3.9 gigahertz using 1.3
volts to hit that setting and for the noise I used my portable sound meter
which is installed about between a foot and a half away from the CPU cooler on
the side that the fan is situated and over a two-minute period I take the
highest noise. I can get with all ambient noise lowered as low as possible
basically nothing else other than the regular ambient noise that's in any room
or any house. So now that we know exactly how we get to the numbers. Let's see
what this cooler had to offer us this time around. So basically if we look at
temperature wise the cooler had a really strong showing of 28 degrees above
ambient temperature. So at 28 degrees Celsius Delta which and that's without
the LNC installed. So at its best performance it's up there with the best of
them although it is not the best performer out of the entire cooler. We're not
talking about a big difference with the LNC installed as you can see on the
same graph we only lost one degree Celsius so we were at 29 ambient which is
actually less than I thought. It mean it's less of a difference and I thought
there'd be I thought we'd lose at least 2 or 3 degrees at these temperatures
but so LNC overall doesn't cut too much into the performance of this cooler.
Now
let's look at the noise difference because this is where we got a really nice
surprise from this cooler. So basically right here at in the next graph, the
fat at 100% without the LNC, we were at 44 decibels which is still amongst pretty
some of the quieter coolers that we've tested but was far from being the
coolest we had with the LNC installed. However this cooler smashed all the
others quietly in noise performance by hitting a low of 37 decibels. I mean you
cannot hear this fan unless you really strained to hear it with LNC installed
which was a really really nice surprise this time around. So if you're looking
for a quiet installation this cooler with the LNC, you don't lose too much
performance and the noise is actually pretty good.
See you know where should we fit this cooler in can we recommend it what should we do. Number one, The mounting system isn't is interesting because at least this one allows us to set it with a m4 in a horizontal direction so it fits pretty nice with the case designs as well as the mounting system being identical to the whole Deepcool gammaxc series. But overall I was really impressed by this cooler. It's maybe not the top performance-wise I've put a really strong showing and LNC was a really good idea where someone who doesn't mind sacrificing a degree or two of performance can get a really quiet cooler out of it. So for a cooler with silent in the name, it's really nice to see that they delivered on their promise so honestly if you're building a Ryzen 7 or a you know i7 series you don't want to put more than 30 bucks on your cooler. But you want to get some of the best performance you can get out of it. We're going to make a synthesis but this is one of the coolers I say you should strongly look at the term Thertake contac silent 12 is a very strong contender especially at the under $30 market. Of course if we compare it to more expensive coolers like $50 coolers and eventually get blown out of the water performance wise but performance in silence is a great combo and honestly it's really hard to find something bad to say about this other than the fact that it didn't have the best performance of the coolers.
If you like the review of Thermaltake Contac Silent 12 or
have any questions just leave your comments in the comment section and I will
try to reply all of you. Thank you so much
0 Comments