The Alpha P125C Heatsink

The first word in cooling

Alpha, the first letter in the Greek alphabet; a term for software in development (Windows 98), or one sweet heatsink. I'll let you guys guess which Alpha we are going to be talking about. Since 1972, Alpha Company Ltd. has produced cold-forged parts in a wide range of fields, and today, they claim that their internally developed Micro-Forging technology surpasses any other forging techniques. It's probably true as today, their heatsinks can be found in computers from SUN Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Toshiba, Fujitsu and NEC.

The Alpha line of heatsink first came into the American end-user with the overclocking craze, led by the Celeron 300a. In an effort to push their chips to the engineering envelope, overclockers sought "extreme" cooling methods. Alpha heatsinks are one step beyond those extreme heatsinks.

Kid tested, mother approved

Manufactured in Japan by Alpha Company Ltd. these heatsinks are constructed of Aluminum an are characterized by their large and dense heatsink fins. The Alpha heatsink we are testing is the P125C series, one of the smaller heatsinks for slot 1 CPU's. After looking at the the other products offered by Alpha, we see that the P125C is actually one of the more traditional heatsink designs. The spiral cut heatsink and star shaped pins in the other Alpha heatsinks really belong in an art museum. Imagine, a polished Aluminum Alpha heatsink as a paperweight…

Hollow-star pin attack!!

Art deco spiral heatsink

A unifying characteristic of these heatsinks are their massive proportions. Mounted on a Celeron, no traditional CPU support systems can be used. Custom mounts will need to be crafted -- more on this later. These heatsinks also exceed Intel's recommended masses for Pentium II, III, and Celeron heatsinks. The current P125C heastink will not fit SECC2 CPU's without some drilling. A SECC2 version of the Alpha heatsink is in the works.