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Alpha P125 Installation.The Alpha P125 is design to work with Pentium II or Celeron CPUs. It does not work with Pentium III's at this time. Alpha is working on a PIII version. I was thinking of testing the unit on a Pentium III but after looking at the heatsink and seeing what is needed to make this cooler work on a Pentium III, I decided to test it on a Celeron 366 instead. :-) Installation is pretty straight forward. It does take longer than the average heatsink to install because the unit comes unassembled. The first thing you have to do is attach the fans on to the heatsink cover. Alpha says the fans should be blowing out. However I notice a bit better performance with the fans blowing in. All screws and connectors are supplied with the P125. Once the fans are on the cover, you attach the cover on the heatsink itself with 4 screws. Then you are finally ready to attach the unit to the CPU. The Celeron mounting system that Alpha uses works really great. It uses a spring mount and 4 tubes with screws to mount the Celeron to the heatsink. Click here for a install diagram by John Bogush. The Alpha P125 weigh over 600 grams. This exceeds Intel's recommended heatsink weight by over 200%. You may want to think twice about using this heatsink if you move your computer around allot. Either that or think of a way to securely mount the unit. The main problem with installing the P125 on a Celeron was that the only thing that supports the P125 heatsink is the Celeron. The Alpha P125 is allot more secured when installed on a Pentium II because the slot one rails of the motherboard holds the Pentium II and heatsink in place. Those slot one rails don't do that for a Celeron and you can't use Celeron clips with the Alpha P125 because it's too big. What I did was use a couple of zip ties (left over from the VEK 12 Pentium III conversion) and loop it thought the top outer holes of the Celeron and around the slot one rails. Basically it's the same thing I did to the Pentium III and Global Win VEK 12. This held the unit nice and tight. Total time to install from start to finish was about 15 minutes. Before you consider an Alpha P125, you should make sure your case and motherboard can accommodate it. This is a big unit and doesn't fit in some cases. The case that have trouble are the 17 inch ones that have the powersuppy on one side, like the In Winn A500. The P125's fans would hit the powersupply.  |