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what hap to Alpha heatsinks?

jstanthr

jstanthr

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 11, 2009
Messages
236
ive been out of the modding and cooling game for a it, but now i'm back and ready to make up some ground. back when i was into there was a company named Alpha that made superb heatsinks, pricey but very good, i was using a slot 1 p3 900 with an alpha pep66 was a huge chunk of copper with a shroud and 2 80mm fans on it, had that think overclocked to 1.2 and at that time, that was amazing, watercooling was just in its infancy then, and if you wanted a "blowhole" u'd better have a 4.5 inch hole saw handy, black cases were hard to find then as well. it amazes me how far its came. i tried to find my original [H] login but couldn't figure it out so i had to make a new one. but back on topic. is alpha still in business? or were they bought out? at that time the only places to buy pc mod supplies was 2cooltek, plycon, a hardware store, there were other sites, but for the life of me i can't remember them. i think i even still have some of the old s370 to slot 1 adaptors laying around, lolZ.
 
Welcome back!

I remember everything you've mentioned. I've owned 2 Alpha heatsinks in the past, and the manufacturing quality of those sinks (esp. the seamless copper inlays) was excellent. I'm not sure what happened to them or globalwin or any of those guys, but we still have our Delta screamer fans available. 60mm is out, and 120/140mm is in.

I remember purchasing gear from plycon and 2cooltek and 3dfxcool. SVC is still around though...

Now the new Alpha is Thermalright (but they've been around for a while) with their TRUE heatsink line, however there are many worthy competitors.

Watercooling is more mainstream now with Swiftech, EK, XSPC, Laing, etc...

Uh... I'm not sure what kind of response you wanted, but this brought back some memories. I used to own the BigMofoRex (s370?) heatsink, which was just a globalwin FDP-32 with some rebadged YS-tech fans on it. It was "da shit." :)

Edit: Oh yea, and I used those same "slotket" adapters from s370 to slot 1. I believe I had so many BX-boards from Abit (bx6, bh6, etc) and a nice mendocino celeron 366a OC'ed to 616. Good Lord: I still remember the S-spec: SL36C malaysian
 
i was just sorting through some old stuff i had lying around and it made me wonder and i thought id throw up a thread about it. speaking of abit, i still have my bp6 dual celery board, still works too, has 2 of the original danger den "maze" waterblocks on it, back then it was just a flat piece of copper with a cup on it pretty much, they didn't have pin structures at first, but it didn't take long, heat pipe coolers weren't heard of then i don't think, but it sure was fun back then, a few of us would get together and mod our new cases (all beige compusa specials) and we would take the hole saw to em and have at it. i still have some of the old aluminum frame panaflo fans, they don't put out much by todays standards, but they sure did then, o well, i guess it all goes to show my age
 
one other thing i remember doing a lot of, was the first amd thunderbird processors, taking a pencil and reconnecting the traces ontop of the chip to unlock the multiplier, that was like the hottest thing at that time i remember taking a 900 chip to 1.3 and that was phenominal, although it seems like it was harder to overclock back then, i guess because most everything was controlled by a jumper, thank god they got rid of the majority of that.
 
jstanthr said:
one other thing i remember doing a lot of, was the first amd thunderbird processors, taking a pencil and reconnecting the traces ontop of the chip to unlock the multiplier, that was like the hottest thing at that time i remember taking a 900 chip to 1.3 and that was phenominal, although it seems like it was harder to overclock back then, i guess because most everything was controlled by a jumper, thank god they got rid of the majority of that.
Click to expand...

unfortunately they wisened up and laser cut the traces later on.

The other day I found a PIII in the dumpster and yes, I had to dumpster dive. I couldn't let that beautiful slot-1 CPU goto the landfill. It would make such a great paperweight. Now if only the Slot-1 CPUs came with the other half of the plastic shell they would look cool!

The thing had been upgraded with a coolermaster 30mm fan lol. As for the ASUS motherboard it was on, the battery is probably a good save as well as the jumpers and I can desolder the fan headers to make my own fan adapters/extensions. I turned the reset button switch and wire to the motherboard from that dumpster computer into a two-pin bios reset switch for my current motherboard.
 
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the pencil trick was for the ones that were laser cut, you could take a #2 pencil and redraw the trace and it would work just fine.
 
Looks like they are still here but got out of the enthusiast sector. I see server stuff and nothing with heatpipes. http://www.alphanovatech.com/



/sigh Back when OCing was for real men, I remember mentioning I water cooled my PC/ heater cores /aquarium pumps (tyan dual slot one board ) to a room full of fellow EE's and they where like "What in the hell are you talking about ?"

It still amazes me what a small community we still are as most people with computers have no clue about all the free horsepower or are scared to death the machine will "blow up" etc. etc.
 
Ahh yes, I still have a alpha hs in my very old lan box. huge and heavy. I had the same delta 80mm fan on it that is shown on the link kyle posted lol, very loud and annoying. but for a lan box who cares. and what a pain to clean that heatsink when it was full of dust.

I ended up using that fan to cool down my rad on my ktm dirt bike lol.

Brings back memorys.
Remember the Delta 60x38mm fan spinning at what? 8800rpm or what not. I lost alot of sleep at night over that very loud high pitched fan. Prime95 running all night trying to get that perfect over clock lol. I can't remember the heatsink at the time but it was the 'one' to have and I lapped it and polished it by hand lol.
 
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