Testing
When I first opened up the box i thought "eek" that is one large heat sink and what are all these little screws for... I was then lost, I read the instructions and took the Vek 32 off from my Athlon and started putting this beast on, as my Athlon had no plastic cover i borrowed one from my spare Athlon to help me to make sure the heat sink was on properly. It was hard to screw them on. If you want an Alpha you can get one from coolerguys.com and they sell with or without fans, mine came with 2 YSTech 26.2 CFM fans, which sure push a lot of air in.As with all of the new alphas the base plate of this alpha is copper, the advantage of which is that it can transfer more heat than normal aluminum. But if the heat sink was made completely of copper it would take longer to dissipate the heat this is why there is only a thin layer present. So the heat hits the copper plate and then pushes out the heat to the aluminum`, which dissipates it.
The P7125 is made up of four rows of very tall fins, which i hasten to add are easy to bend, the first 11 of these find are cut shorter so that you can use it on the K7M motherboard where the power connector isn’t in the easiest place. There isn’t apparently much loss of performance cutting these fins. The copper plate makes up for this easily
I installed the cooler on our Ka7 it fitted perfectly as ABIT have positioned the power connector a good distance away from the CPU, this means that this cooler would not need to be cut, It also didn’t cover any dim slots like I have been hearing reports about especially on the K7M.
The heat sink is attached to the Athlon heat plate by 4 bolts which are quiet hard to screw in. There is then the large shroud, which goes over the top of this heat plate, and this is again held in place with 4 bolts, and finally there are the 2 YSTech fans mounted on the top of the cooler with the girls.
I installed this on my Athlon 650 core with the thermal paste, which was provided, I then put this on my Ka7 which is in my ATCS200 case, which is normally quiet, but the fans used on the P7125 are very powerful and loud. I then powered up the system it had an idle temperature of a mere 29 degrees, this is 4 degrees better than a vek32 already!
I then thought lets hit something I smacked the Athlon up to 800 Mhz and it did it no problem the temperature was rising and then stabilized at 34 degrees We then pushed it up to 113 bus speed and it did this no problems! This was beating any other cooler, which I have ever used! The max temperature after playing Q3a for an hour or so was 39 degrees, this is nothing! My Vek32 used to idle at this temperature doing rc5
