Before you can do any work on the Alpha, you'll have to first strip your Pentium III down to just bare PCB. If you have an OEM PIII, you'll just have to remove the back plate. If you have a retail PIII, you'll have to remove the back plate and the factory heatsink. Click here to find out how to do that. 

The first think you need to do is drill a 3/8" hole on one side of the sink. This is to clear one of the caps from the Pentium III. I didn't have a 3/8" drill bit hanging around so I use a Dremel and routed it out. You don't have to go in very deep. Just 1/16 of inch will do it. 

Now for the fun part. Line up your Pentium III with the heatsink like the above photo and use the tap to tap some starter holes. Be very very careful here. One miss and you can kiss your CPU good bye. 4 taps from the hammer and you're ready to start drilling. 

Line up the drill with the tap holes you made and drill the heatsink. A drill press would be ideal, but in a pinch, you can use a normal drill like I did. 

After drilling the 4 Pentium III mounting holes, you need to drill some new holes for the fan cover. Since the PIII will be mounted inverted, the fan cover must be inverted too. Lucky for us the P125 comes with 4 roles of fins. Just drill 2 holes on the next role. Line it up with the 2 holes that came with the Alpha. 

Next page: Doing The Tap Dance