Friday, January 17th 2020
Cooler Master Redesigns its TIM Packaging so Parents Don't Think Their Kids are Doing Drugs
Applying thermal interface material (TIM) properly is a simple task that is under-documented or sometimes even misrepresented by the press. A bad application harms, rather than help your thermals. Their application varies from either the "pea drop" method, where you squeeze the TIM syringe or sachet to put out a tiny pea size blob onto your chip, letting the pressure from the heatsink spread the TIM out; or using an included spatula or plastic card to spread the TIM out to a very thin film. Of course when minors have plastic cards and syringes lying around in their rooms, parents sometimes get the wrong idea.
Cooler Master, in a tweet confirmed that it redesigned its TIM packaging to address exactly this: that TIMs supplied in syringes that look and function identical to medical syringes, make parents think their kids are doing drugs. "We didn't change the shape of the syringe to make applying thermal paste a lot easier, but because we we're getting tired of having to explain parents that their kid isn't using drugs," reads the Cooler Master statement. The new packaging by Cooler Master looks closer to a highlighter or Play Doh tube than it does a medical syringe. It still uses a syringe-like manual piston to dispense TIM, but the nozzle is wide and flattened to put out a layer of TIM directly on your chip. It's no longer round, and you can no longer attach injection needles. This nozzle also takes away the need for plastic cards or spatulas. The design, however, has a downside: the "pea drop" application is impossible, and a somewhat sub-optimal method is being forced upon users. Did Cooler Master just give in to pressure from an uninformed section of the market? Could a printed disclaimer on a conventional round syringe have helped instead? Tell us in the comments below.
Cooler Master, in a tweet confirmed that it redesigned its TIM packaging to address exactly this: that TIMs supplied in syringes that look and function identical to medical syringes, make parents think their kids are doing drugs. "We didn't change the shape of the syringe to make applying thermal paste a lot easier, but because we we're getting tired of having to explain parents that their kid isn't using drugs," reads the Cooler Master statement. The new packaging by Cooler Master looks closer to a highlighter or Play Doh tube than it does a medical syringe. It still uses a syringe-like manual piston to dispense TIM, but the nozzle is wide and flattened to put out a layer of TIM directly on your chip. It's no longer round, and you can no longer attach injection needles. This nozzle also takes away the need for plastic cards or spatulas. The design, however, has a downside: the "pea drop" application is impossible, and a somewhat sub-optimal method is being forced upon users. Did Cooler Master just give in to pressure from an uninformed section of the market? Could a printed disclaimer on a conventional round syringe have helped instead? Tell us in the comments below.
66 Comments on Cooler Master Redesigns its TIM Packaging so Parents Don't Think Their Kids are Doing Drugs
www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html
Anyway, this is complete and total nonsense. Any idiot should be able to see past it...
1. Thermal compound, by comparison, is cheap. I don't think I can get a syringe full of any street drug for $7.99?
2. Street drugs do not come packaged in the same way thermal compound would. How often do you hear of dope dealers selling clean syringes full of their, erm, product, complete with plastic clamshell casing?
3. Street drugs do not come with directions for applying them to CPUs and whatnot.
4. I've never heard of a drug dealer named "Cooler Master"... :laugh:
I mean, my god... is April 1st early this year?
Dr Su would be disappointed reading those things haha :laugh:
I really hope the article's a joke
This is beyond stupid and if there are seriously these parents, the apocalypse is very close, it just has to be. WTF
We changed our packaging again so kids won't treat it as a SNACK bar.
Back in the days my mom actually started "the syringe talk" with me
CM's twitter is full of referential humour and jokes like this. Not 10 tweets down from this they advertise their Respawn mouse with the line "Hey, as long as reboots are in these days, we might as well get in on the action too. ". Below that they shared a picture of a white-themed PC with the joke "This PC is so white, the windows startup sound is a coldplay song".
CM's twitter is full of humour in exactly this vein, and if this were serious marketing copy, and not just a twitter joke, I'd have hoped CM would have thought to proofread it, instead of saying "We we're tired of".
Where it gets problematic is when we start accomodating them, in doing so, we create our own evolutionary failures and enlarge them.
Strange mix of hilarious and frightening, isn't it.