Cooler Master has demonstrated a funky new color-changing CPU cooler that will glow orange/red when heated up and stay inky black when cool. The color-change coating the company is developing could be used on all manner of components but is first being demonstrated on this cooler.
As power is applied to the CPU, it’s plain to see how heat moves rapidly through the cooler’s heatpipes and spreads out along the radiator fins, with the intensity of the color diminishing towards the furthest and coolest parts of the cooler.
See Cooler Master’s color-changing cooler in action in the video below from Hardware Canucks.
The choice of an orangey red is particularly striking as it really does look as if the cooler is getting red hot when contrasted with the normal black color of the cooler. It’s also notable as, while we’ve seen temperature-dependent paints before, it’s not often you get such a strong change in color.
One potential downside of such a coating could be a slight reduction in thermal effciency, as the coating is unlikely to have a higher thermal conductivity than the cooler’s metal fins. However, we’ve seen painted cooler fins before, and generally such finishes haven’t affected cooling performance too much.
Still only in a prototype phase, Cooler Master was showcasing the technology at its booth at the Computex 2023 trade show in Taiwan. The cooler model wasn’t specified but is a dual-tower design reminiscent of the Cooler Master MA624 but with only one fan in the middle of the two stacks of fins – to best show off the coating.
Would you like to see CPU coolers with this color change coating? Or are there some other computer parts you’d like to see with it – a mouse that shows the heat from your hand perhaps?
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