Written
: 11/11/99
Written by:
MotoŽ
Alpha P3125 Supplied by:
AMK Services
By itself, the new Alpha P3125 is the highest
performing cooler that we have ever tested. It easily beat all the other
heatsinks we have tested here in the last few months. However, that doesn't mean
there is no room for improvement. We decided to see if we can improve the
performance of an already great cooler.
We started with our Pentium III-450 and ran
the Alpha P3125 as recommended by Alpha. This setup produced the lowest temp
reading at 580Mhz that we have ever recorded. We would tell you the measurements
we got but we're saving that for the complete P3125 review. This article will
show how we management to improve on the factory setup without spending any
money.
Improving the performance of the Alpha P3125
was a 2 step process. The first was the removal of the backplate and the second
was the installation of a L2 cache spacer. The combination of the 2 resulted in
a 4C drop in the already recording setting low temperature.
Be warned that if you do this project on a
retail Pentium 3 like we did, you will void your warranty. So make sure you can
live without it first. If you have a retail Pentium 3 and you still want to go
ahead and do what we did, then the first thing you have to do is remove that
factory heatsink.
Go here to find out how to do that. However, don't blame us if you blow up
your CPU. :)
Once you have strip the Pentium 3 down to
bare PCB, it's time to do the serious work. Let's begin.
Next page: The L2 Spacer
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