Once you have the Jing Ting Force cooler in place, check the surrounding connectors to make sure none are being blocked. In some instances, you may find that it might block the SATA connectors. If so, just reposition everything by shifting things over after loosening the brackets.

For my rig, the last PCI expansion slot is taken up by an Audigy 2 ZS sound card. The card is not particularly long, but it does extend a bit over the edge of the PCI slot.

Since the base's height is about the same height as the stock DFI chipset cooler, my MSI 6600GT video card should clear it without any problems.

SATA connectors

Audigy 2 ZS sound card

MSI 6600GT video card

If you are a DFI fanatic, you will probably have visited the DFI-Street forums. By doing a quick search for chipset cooler, you'll see quite a number of threads on this topic. One of the recommendations of most users is to get the Evercool VC-RE video card cooler. The Evercool was not meant to work on a chipset, but the push pins are just slightly wider that a tiny nudge wouldn't fix. The size of the Evercool is the selling point since it's just about as big as the DFI stock cooler.

So to make things fair, I went and sourced an Evercool VC-RE to run the same tests.

Tested on the following system:

• AMD Opteron 144 939 1.8Ghz @ 2.8Ghz
• Patriot TCCD 2x512MB DDR
• DFI LanpartyUT nF4 Ultra-D motherboard
• Windows XP Professional w/SP2

For idle temps, the machine was just left running with no applications open. For load results, 3DMark05 and Sisoft Burn-in was run a few times.

I was not able to obtain stock figures on the DFI cooler since it completely died. The Jing Ting Force cooler did very similar to the Evercool besting it by 1C at idle, however, the Jing Ting Force is MUCH quieter during operation.

For the overclocker, performance is the top selling point. Cooling your chipset can help you gain that extra Mhz. Most of the time, this comes with a price in the form of noise. The fan on the stock DFI and Evercool were far noisier than the Jing Ting's 21dBA 40mm fan. I'll take quiet any day of the week when possible.

With the performance and the ease of installation of the Jing Ting, it's a good buy in our book. If we wanted to, we can replace the 40mm with a higher speed model. Fan replacement is a breeze compared to the non-replaceable built-in fan design adopted by the stock DFI unit.

Thanks to Sidewinder Computers for sending us this sample. Gary over at Sidewinder has also mentioned Jing Ting will be unveiling a revised version of the Force cooler. Time will tell if it does better than this current version we're digging right now.