Cooler Master painted a landscape onto a CPU using thermal paste and the hardware nerd in me can't help but think 'that's way too much'

Cooler Master's landscape painting made using Cryofuze 5 Prism thermal paste

(Image credit: Cooler Master)

Forget digital art, give me that real-world, touchable, sniffable stuff. In fact, forget oils and pencils, give me a few tubes of coloured thermal paste and an Intel chip and let me go to town.

Oh… Cooler Master's already done it? Of course they have. For reasons probably known only to the manufacturer, Cooler Master has decided to paint a "happy little landscape" on what looks like an Intel 13th or 14th Gen chip using its multicoloured Cryofuze 5 Prism thermal paste.

First, the Cryofuze 5 paste is slopped onto a pallet and and mixed together. Then, the unknown artist goes to town. Once finished, the artwork is proudly displayed atop the CPU, which is seated in a Gigabyte Aorus Z790 motherboard.

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Impressive and seemingly pointless, yes, but it makes for an eye-catching advertisement for its coloured Cryofuse 5 thermal paste. This kind of paste being one that you can buy packaged together in all its colour variants under the "Prism" moniker.

I wasn't even aware that coloured thermal paste existed until now, and I can't help but wonder why it exists at all. You're not meant to be able to, y'know, actually see thermal paste once it's doing its job, so why would you care what colour it is?

Just a happy little landscape, thanks to our Cyrofuse thermal paste.🎨@AORUS_NA #pcmr pic.twitter.com/1Tki9alnVcAugust 27, 2024

It doesn't seem like Cooler Master knows, either, because its product page mentions benefits only of the actual thermal paste, not the various colours. Maybe landscape painting is the only justification—and why not?

Just don't go painting your own landscapes and expecting much thermal benefit. Hardware nerds have long recommended using the quick and easy pea-sized dollop technique (a technical term) rather than the tedious landscape painting one.

Even today, with Intel's oddly rectangular chips, adding a few mini dollops in the corners and bigger dollops in the centre, per Noctua recommendations (PDF warning), should perform better and be quicker to set up than a completely lathered chip.

But hey, Cooler Master, you do you. I can't say my day was any the worse for seeing your peculiar creation.

Jacob got his hands on a gaming PC for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He swiftly realised the local PC repair store had ripped him off with his build and vowed never to let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Jacob the hardware junkie was born. Since then, Jacob's led a double-life as part-hardware geek, part-philosophy nerd, first working as a Hardware Writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working towards a PhD in Philosophy for a few years (result pending a patiently awaited viva exam) while freelancing on the side for sites such as TechRadar, Pocket-lint, and yours truly, PC Gamer. Eventually, he gave up the ruthless mercenary life to join the world's #1 PC Gaming site full-time. It's definitely not an ego thing, he assures us.