A YouTuber with the nickname mryeester attempted to create the world’s first edible thermal paste for cooling a personal computer’s CPU. He used confectionery gold to do so.
A YouTuber with the nickname mryeester attempted to create the world’s first edible thermal paste for cooling a personal computer’s CPU. He used confectionery gold to do so.
PC Gamer reminds us that gold is an excellent conductor of heat, so mryeester used 24-karat thin gold leaf, which is used in cooking.
However, simple gold leaf is not enough to cool the processor under load. Real thermal paste fills the microscopic air gaps between the chip surface and the cooling plate and significantly improves thermal conductivity.
To create the actual paste, mryeester chose between mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, and toothpaste, but settled on honey. He mixed it with gold right on the surface of the processor. The result was a golden mixture with a large amount of 24-karat gold.
The YouTuber installed a small cooler on top of the processor, and recorded a surprisingly low peak temperature of 53 °C even under prolonged 100 percent load.
He also tested his edible thermal paste on a full-fledged gaming PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor. He first tested it with regular thermal paste and an air cooler and recorded a peak temperature of 70 °C while playing Counter Strike 2. The edible thermal paste showed a not much worse result — 77 °C.
This is significantly higher than the temperature of a regular thermal paste, but still within the normal range for the 9850X3D. The processor never went into throttling mode or limited performance during 10 minutes of playing Counter Strike 2.
Longer tests or more demanding games would likely produce worse results. However, adulterated honey is a highly perishable product and will likely change its consistency with heating cycles and over time.
