Introduction

The market for third party chipset coolers has not been a very big one, but now with hotter motherboard chipsets from NVIDIA its gaining popularity and more manufacturers are listening to the consumers needs. Many motherboards using this chipset were either badly cooled (when overclocking) or relied on a small fan that had to spin incredibly and was very noisy.

Choosing a decent chipset cooler that fits your needs is not only a matter of knowing if it's worth your money, the overall design of the cooler will most likely be a crucial factor in the equation. Having two cards running in SLI or simply using a card that's an inch too big could interfere with your brand new cooler and rendering it useless. In this roundup, we take a look at both performance of the coolers and whether SLI can still be used.

The contenders

In total, I tested six different chipset coolers from four different companies:

Zalman ZM-NBF47 (provided by Bacata)

Coolermaster Blue Ice

Coolermaster Blue Ice Pro

Jing Ting JTS-0005

Jing Ting JTS-0006

Thermalright HR-05 (provided by Bacata)

Test Setup

Mich_vm's test setup
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Winchester core (stock)
Cooling	Zalman CNPS 7000Cu
Mainboard	Asus A8N SLI deluxe
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 Corsair ValueSelect
Video	XFX Geforce 6600GT
Other	OCZ Powerstream 420Watt PSU 160Gb Maxtor ATA HDD BenQ DW1655 16x DVD writer 17" Samsung Syncmaster 730BF

On with the show ->