Introduction

First we saw heat pipe technology incorporated with CPU heatsink, then VGA coolers followed and recently the trend has expanded towards other areas, like hard drive cooling, and chipset cooling. The “Chip Force” from Jing Ting is not the first heat pipe chipset cooler on the market, but it’s a product which shows quite a bit of potential.

The nForce4 chipset known to be a big source of heat, removing that heat with a small heatsink and 40mm fan usually results in a noisy solution, as that small fan has to spin 5000+rpm to keep the chipset from overheating. So using heat pipe technology can surely pay of in that area, however there’s a catch when you do decide to swap out that stock cooling solution and install a fancier one: size matters.

If you are running in SLI or even just with a single (large) PCIe card, chances are that the new Chipset heatsink and your VGA card will interfere. So today we take a closer look at Jing Ting’s offering to see if it can be used for effective cooling without losing precious space on your motherboard.



Specifications

Jing Ting JTS-0005 Chipforce
Material	Copper base & plated copper fins (29 fins)
Heatsink Dimensions	82mm* 67mm
Fan Dimension & Specs	40mm*40mm*10mm 4300rpm 4.3CFM
Weight	176gr

Features

Pure Copper base material.

Plated copper heat pipe, transfer the heat quickly.

Universal patent designed adjustable heat pipe, broad array of application.

40mm fan included for increased heat dissipation.

Easy installation.

In the box

The Chip Force comes in a not too exciting cardboard box



The box contains the unit and a bag of mounting material and thermal paste, there was no manual included in the box



An L-shaped heat pipe dictates the design, a series of small fins is fitted with a 40mm fan at one end, the other end if squeezed between two plates;





The bag with mounting material is daunting at first, as there is no manual included:



Filtering through the items these are the items needed for installation on nForce4 chipset:

Installation

Removing the stock cooling from the Asus A8N-SLI Premium is simply a matter of pinching together the plastic push pins and before you know it, the whole heat pipe cooling is off the motherboard:





First thing to do is check to see where you need to install the two O rings,



That seems about right:



The base of the Chip Force seems to be hand lapped, there are machine lapping traces, but also enough marks which lead to believe somebody took the effort to smoothen out the base manually.




One screw at each side with washers to protect the motherboard, two springs, metal washers and then the Chip Force, bolted tight with 2 thumbscrews; it’s a tool-less installation.



Let’s place a Geforce 7800GT on the board:



A tight fit, but it’s doable, larger cards will have clearance when you place them in the upper PCIe slot



Let’s move the video card



This proved to be an even tighter fit, larger cards may not fit properly here, when using 2 cards in SLI, there won’t be enough room. The Chip Force can be tilted sideways, but in this case it won’t do no good.




For comparison we’ve included the Cooler Master Blue Ice, it’s larger than the Jing Ting, a video card in the upper and lower PCIe slot interfere with the Blue Ice:

Test Setup

JMke’s Opteron Test Setup
CPU	Opteron 144 @ 2.7Ghz
Cooling	Arctic Cooling Freezer 64
Mainboard	Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 OCZ Platinum Rev2
Video	XFX Geforce 7800GT
Other	Global Win SAF520 520Watt PSU 200Gb Maxtor SATA HDD Plextor 12x DVDWriter 18.1” Xenon LCD

The test system is installed on an open bench, the ambient temperature during the tests was 23°C, and the ambient noise was 32.5dBA. The dBA meter was placed 30cm away from the chipset cooling. The noise level was recorded with ONLY the chipset cooling running, the VGA and CPU cooling fans were unplugged during this test.



The Asus A8N-SLI Premium stock cooling is quite advanced already, the heat pipe transfers heat from the chipset to a large heatsink close to the CPU socket; with the stock CPU cooling, the fan would blow down onto the motherboard and also cool this smaller heatsink. However with the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 the airflow goes not in that direction, so as an additional test we’ve placed a 1000rpm 80mm fan (Sharkoon Silent Eagle) on this heatsink.



In our previous test of the Cooler Master Blue Ice we used the vanilla Asus A8N board which comes with a small and noisy chipset cooling, the difference with the Blue Ice was almost 10°C. In our tests today we see that Asus’ own solution closes the gap with the Blue Ice by ~5°C, and does so with a completely passive cooling system. The Chip Force JTS-0005 makes an impressive entry, slightly ahead of the Blue Ice both in performance as in dBA reading. However those numbers don’t mean everything, the fan of the Chip Force makes a noticeable mechanical noise, something which the Blue Ice fan does not. So while the dBA readings are in the favor of the Chip Force, subjective listing tests put the Blue Ice in front.


Conclusion

Jing Ting was previously only active in the OEM and distributor market, making products for other well known 3rd party heat sink manufactures like Thermaltake; now they’ve released an impressive product under their own company name with excellent performance and good compatibility.

PRO
Excellent performance
Low noise 40mm fan
Attention to detail, good finish
Good compatibility

CON
40mm fan is not “dead silent”
Not compatible with all SLI motherboards when using two VGA cards

We like to thank Ken from Jing Ting for letting us test their latest product.

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