Asus A8N-SLI chipset issues

I have an Asus A8N-SLI, which is of course notorious for its extremely crappy chipset fan. My fan died a while back, and I replaced the whole Asus setup with a Zalman heatsink.

This worked great, until I realized that I needed to move my graphics card to the slot that lines up with the chipset. Now, my GTS 250 could not fit because of the Zalman cooler.

For now, I removed the Zalman cooler entirely, so that the graphics card would fit. Everything is running smoothly so far, and my motherboard chipset is currently idling at 34 C. I believe that this is OK, and my computer seems to be running smoothly thus far. I am about to run some tests, by playing Crysis and such, and see how the temp does under load.

Anyway, my question is this: can I just forget about cooling that stupid chipset and let it just sit there like this? Or is this risky?

 

Sounds risky to me. My experience is that chipsets get pretty hot. Also, I don't know if the chipset will shut down the computer if it gets too hot like the processor will.

 

Well do the tests under loads and see what temps you get, if they getting high then you will need to get some cooling, try find a smaller cooler than the Zalman

Dacads

 

Ok, the highest temp I have seen thus far is 36 C. I actually have a window unit that blow right on the computer most of the time, keeping it quite refrigerated. 36C is actually a temp I have noticed when I turn the AC off. It didn't even get this hot when under load, and long as the AC was on. So, what is a safe temperature for this thing?