Installation / Setup

A look at the heatsink

Bottom

The Vantec P3D-5030 heatsink is designed for the Pentium II and III SECC2 cartridge CPUs. As with other P3 heatsinks, the side of the heatsink that comes into contact with the processor is completely flat. This allows the rectangular surface of the core to come into full contact with the heatsink, but the thinner L2 cache can't reach the heatsink. The gap between the L2 cache and the heatsink is only about a millimeter wide. The bottom of the heatsink lacks the perforations we've seen on other heatsinks that allow fans to blow onto the cache chips.

Some minor tweakage

We first tried filling the gap with some extra thermal transfer pads we had lying around the office, but then we decided to use two dimes instead of stacking 3 layers of thermal pads between the cache and heatsink.

The heatsink itself also came with a pre-applied graphite thermal transfer pad. We scratched the pad off and replaced it with a nice little drop of Radio Shack thermal compound before attaching it to our P3-600B engineering sample.

Back

Here's a picture of the processor back. We took the retention clip's patent pending sign to heart and canceled our plans to make low cost Taiwanese knock-offs. Oh wait, the clips are already made in Taiwan. Oh well, we would have one upped them and had ours made in sweatshops by red-headed orphans and stepchildren.

The fan's too big

We were all ready to go. The Vantec cooler was nicely attached to our P3-600 with the dual dime support in full effect. We tried sliding the processor into our BE6 motherboard, but we encountered a problem. The size of the fan interfered with the motherboard chipset's heatsink. We could still insert the processor far enough to make the system functional, but we didn't like insulating a portion of the chipset heatsink with the side of the fan guard.

Our BX6 2.0 has a smaller chipset heatsink, and we could fully insert our processor with the Vantec cooler into the motherboard without a problem.