There are many avid overclockers out there today. The number one reason for overclocking has always been to save same cash. Therefore it is sometimes disheartening to find out that many overclockers go overboard with their cooling purchases.

So here's the situation, you have recently purchased a slot 1 Pentium III processor, and are planning to overclock it. If you have purchased an OEM CPU, then you obviously have nothing to work with. However users that have purchased a retail boxed processor are endowed with a rather anemic heat sink and fan combination that is usually only fine for standard CPU speeds.

For the OEM CPU situation, you are forced to either buy a CHEAP heat sink, or you can venture online and purchase a nice aftermarket cooler. With the Retail CPU, you can try overclocking with the Intel heat sink and fan, and you may very well reach high speeds. But stability might be an issue, so you are forced to raise the voltage, and then you find that the temperature is a bit high. Then paranoia sets in, and you now feel the need to get a better cooler just to keep the temperature down.

• Designed and tested for overclockers
• Blazing 5200RPM fan speeds!
• Slip-On Cap, 3-pin Power Connector for monitoring
• Double Ball-Bearing for superior life!
• 25CFM, double ball bearing, Ultra Quiet
• Each fan is 50x50x10mm (Total fan size 137x59x45mm)
• Aluminum Alloy 6030 T5 Heat sink for FAST heat dissipation

Unfortunately, I only have a PIII-450 to test this heat sink with. Once again here is the test system:

Bao's Box O' Pain:

• Intel Pentium III 450 SECC2
• Abit VT6X4 Motherboard (w/ 4 in 1 v 4.20 drivers)
• 2 X 128MB PC-133 Micron (CAS 3)
• IBM Desktar 13.6GB 7200 RPM ATA/66
• Creative Labs Annihilator Pro (Using leaked Detonator V5.16 Drivers, Core and Memory speed set at default, unless noted.)
• Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live Platinum
• "SOHO" 10/100 NIC
• D-Link 530TX 10/100 NIC
• Toshiba 5X DVD
• Plextor 8432A CDRW
• "Super Case" -- Midtower with an Enermax 350 Watt power supply.

I was able to overclock the Pentium III 450 all the way up to 558MHZ (600MHZ wasn't possible because this was an early model.) I will touch on Quake III scores, as well as a temperature comparison at 450MHZ (default) and 558MHZ (overclocked speed.)

Let's examine the heat sink carefully, as you can plainly see, there is the dreadful, awful, thermal pad. Naturally I scraped it off using the most modern tool available to me (my fingernails.) With the annoying thermal pad gone, I applied a very thin layer of Silver Thermal paste to the CPU contact area.

I initially attempted the big 150 MHZ overclock at first (600MHZ.) I booted into Windows'98 at 2.05 V (the default voltage for Intel PIII Katmai 600 Processors.) But Quake III would lock up in 3 seconds. I tried 2.1V, Quake III would reboot the system, the same thing happened at 2.2V and 2.3V. Raising the voltage did help to stabilize Quake III, but at 2.3V it would reboot in 5 minutes. At 2.3V the processor reached 41C quickly. Therefore I am not ruling out that an Alpha P3125S would've rectified the situation. Alternatively it is entirely possible that the CPU just can't handle it J . It just seems strange that a CPU that can at least boot into Windows at "default" voltage, cannot be stabilized through voltage adjustments.

The next attempt was a more reasonable one. I set the CPU to a 4.5X multiplier, and a FSB of 124MHZ, as well as a core voltage of 2.2V. This set up was rock solid, so the following Quake III benchmarks will display the differences between the PIII-450 @ 450MHZ vs the PIII-450 @ 558MHZ(4.5*124 = 558MHZ.)