Thermaltake Contac 29 Review

Testing of the heatsink will involve a load simulated by Prime95 using small FFTs in stock and overclocked scenarios. Idle and load temperatures will be recorded. Load temperatures will be the maximum value displayed in RealTemp after running eight threads in Prime95 for one hour, and idle temperatures will be the minimum value recorded by RealTemp with no computer usage after one hour. The temperature values for each of the four cores will be averaged. The ambient temperature is held at a constant 25° C throughout testing of the Contac 29, as well as the comparison heatsinks. All the data shown in the graphs is in Celsius. The included thermal paste from Thermaltake will be used during testing, and thermal pastes as packaged from the other coolers were used with each heatsink respectively.

Testing Setup:

• Processor: Intel i7 920 (Stock 2.66GHz and Overclocked to 3.40GHz @ 1.27v)
• Motherboard: MSI Eclipse SLI
• Memory: Mushkin Ridgeback 12800 6-8-6-24
• Video Card: nVidia GTX260
• Power Supply: Mushkin 800w Modular Power Supply
• Hard Drive: Seagate 1TB SATA
• Optical Drive: Lite-On DVD-RW
• OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
• Ambient Temperature: 25° Celsius
• CPU Heatsink: Stock Intel

Comparison Heatsinks:

• Stock Intel heatsink
• Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme
• Cooler Master Hyper N620
• Titan Entertainer TTC-NK95TZ

For such a light and thin cooler, the Contac 29 performed quite well! It held up better than I expected, especially for a price of only $30 at most any computer retailer. However, being of small size, it begins to fall off with the extra heat of the loaded overclocked processor. Either way, for the price, I am pleased with the Contac 29's performance for sure. I'll wrap up the review on the next page with my conclusions.