Installation

Putting on the cooler was one thing, taking the stock cooler off was another. I had the hardest time trying to take the stock cooling off.

Intel did a good job at trying to prevent people from taking their CPU apart. After messing with it for almost an hour, I decided to look it up on the Internet. The solution to this was so easy. All I had to do was take one ordinary screw from my computer case and use it to pop out the pins that support the heatsink in place. It only took me less than two minutes to do this.

After I was done I was free to examine my new Pentium III CPU. I was very happy to see the marking 36A on my NEC cache. Meaning that my cache is able to go much higher than what Intel has it running at stock values. If you take 1000 and divide it by 3.6, you get 277. The cache on the Pentium III runs at half speed, so if you multiply that value by two you get 555, so now I know I am at least guaranteed to run the CPU at 558MHz.

The heatsink compound that comes with the 3Dfx Cool Alpha also comes from Alpha. There is not much in the tube. This is probably to prevent people from burning up their CPU by putting too much on the core. After I put less than a quarter pea size of thermal compound on, I placed the easily assembled Alpha P3125 on it. My CPU then looked monstrous and capable of 600MHz operation.

Overclocking Results

After plugging the CPU into my BX6 revision 2, I powered on the system and let it run at 450MHz for a while. The Alpha was barely warm, so I then tried bumping up the front side bus little by little. I got the front side bus up to 124MHz with the memory still at CAS2 and RAS two. The core voltage was at the default 2.0 volts. The CPU ran fine with everything I threw at it. There was also no surprise that the Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra ran fine with the 82.66MHz AGP bus speed. The Abit BX6 revision 2 also has that handy ¼ multiplier for the PCI bus making for a very stable 31MHz for my PCI boards.

The Alpha P3125 cooler may be a little loud, but I can live with that for the performance it can give me. After about an hour of testing running at 558MHz, I decided to go for the next step: 580MHz.

I ran into a little bit of a problem at this setting, the RAM in my system didn’t like to run at 129MHz with CAS2 and RAS3, so I raised them to both a level of 3. The system fired right up and was completely stable with every 2D application I used. This was with 2.0 volts still. I then tried 3D mark and was welcomed with some serious AGP stalling. The race scene was pausing all the time making it appear that the whole system was on the brink of totally locking up.

The board I had in there at the time was the Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra. It’s a good board, but nothing like the Creative Labs GeForce Annihilator I recently bought…

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