Written: 6/28/99
Written by: MotoŽ

No, the picture above is not a new Star Wars Pod Racer, even though it looks like one. What you're looking at is a Pentium III-500 mounted on an Alpha P125 cooler. 

The Alpha P125 is the most powerful cooler you can buy for a Pentium II or Celeron CPU. The only problem is you can't use it on a Pentium III. This is a problem we will try to fix with this article.

There are many good reasons to convert a P125 to work with your Pentium III. The number one reason would be there is simply no other Pentium III heatsink on the market that can remotely come close to matching the sheer performance of this cooler. Global VES 20? TennMax TF? Forget about them! Only the Global Win VEK 12 can give the Alpha P125 a run for it's money.

The Alpha P125 gets it's performance by it's sheer size (it just HUGE!) and by using the same fans found in Global Win's VEK 12. Well, let's correct that. If you buy an Alpha P125 from 2CoolTek, you will get it with the Global Win fans. If you buy a P125 from other suppliers, chances are you will get it with quieter, less powerful fans. The Global Win fans that 2CoolTek's Alpha uses move an incredible 27.2 CFM of air EACH. Hmmm, maybe it can be passed off as a Pod Racer. 

Converting an Alpha P125 to work with a Pentium III takes allot more work than converting a Global Win VEK 12, but the end results may be worth it. After the installation of the P125 to the PIII-500, I was able to overclock the CPU to 620Mhz with the L2 latency set to 1 and 645Mhz with the L2 off. 100% stable! The Global Win VEK 12 can take the same PIII-500 to 620Mhz. However it wasn't 100% stable. There were the occasional crashes and lockups once in awhile. The P125 was also able to take the PIII-450 to 600Mhz. The best the VEK 12 did was 580Mhz.

If you want to take your Pentium III to speed it has never dream off before, installing an Alpha P125 is a good way to get there. So, exactly how did I get a P125 to work with my Pentium III-500? Let's find out.

Next page: Tools Required