Cooler Master painted the landscape on the CPU with thermal paste, and as a hardware nerd I couldn’t facilitate but think, “that’s way too much”

Forget digital art, give me real, physical, smellable stuff. Actually, forget oils and pencils, give me a few tubes of colored thermal paste and an Intel chip and let me go to town.

Oh… Cooler Master already did that? Of course they did. For reasons probably known only to the manufacturer, Cooler Master decided to paint “happy little landscape” on what looks like a 13th or 14th generation Intel processor using multi-colored Cryofuze 5 Prism Thermal Paste.

First, Cryofuze 5 paste is poured onto a palette and mixed. Then, the unknown artist gets to work. Once finished, the work of art is proudly displayed atop the processor, which sits on the Gigabyte Aorus Z790 motherboard.

Impressive and seemingly nonsensical, yes, but it’s an eye-catching advertisement for the colorful Cryofuse 5 thermal paste. This kind of paste can be bought in a package in all sorts of colors under the name “Prism.”

Until now, I didn’t even know colored thermal paste existed, and I can’t facilitate but wonder why it even exists. You shouldn’t be able to, you know, see the thermal paste doing its job, so why should you care about its color?

Cooler Master doesn’t seem to know either, as the product page only mentions the benefits of the thermal paste itself, not the different colors. Maybe painting landscapes is the only justification — and why not?

Just don’t paint your own landscapes and don’t expect great thermal benefits. Hardware enthusiasts have long recommended using the quick and basic pea-sized (technical term) technique instead of the tedious task of painting landscapes.

Even today, with Intel’s oddly rectangular chips, they add a few compact portions in the corners and larger portions in the middle, according to Night recommendations (PDF warning), should perform better and be faster to set up than a fully foam-covered IC.

But hey, Cooler Master, do what you want. I can’t say my day was worse after seeing your peculiar work.