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: