Cooler Master CryoFuze 5 Review – When CPU Is Your Canvas

Unboxing

Remember that small “controversy” surrounding the idea that Cooler Master was marketing an “AI Thermal Paste”? The Cooler Master CryoFuze 5 is the thermal paste in question, but as the company noted, it was caused by a mistranslation and there’s no mentions of it being AI-capable otherwise. While it doesn’t have sentience, what it does have is a lot of colors – in fact, there are six available to choose from.

Each box contains one color, and they each come with cleaning material and a scraper. Speaking of colors, you have black, red, yellow, green, blue and white to choose from – we’re told by Cooler Master that they are sold individually, so if you want to channel your inner Bob Ross, prepare to shell out for a fair bit of cash to collect all six of them.

If you have more than one of these at hand, you can try mix-and-match, though it’s best to put too much paste that it ends up spilling to the substrate and the socket frame. But the idea that you can pick what color you’d like is at best a novelty, since it’s always going to be squished into a flat patch of gooey stuff if you ever want to power this PC on.

Specifications

Cooler Master CryoFuze 5

Full specifications available in product page and datasheet.

Color	Black, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, White
Thermal Conductivity	Unspecified
Specific Gravity	3.0g/cm³ (25°C)
Volume / Weight	3g

Test System

CPU	Intel Core i9-13900K
Cooling	Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux 30th Anniversary Edition Cooler Master CryoFuze 5
Motherboard	ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 HERO
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition
Memory	Kingston FURY RENEGADE DDR5 RGB (DDR5-6400 CL32, 2x16GB)
Storage	ADATA LEGEND 960 MAX 1TB
Power Supply	GameMax Rampage GX-1050 PRO (ATX 3.1) 1050W
Case	VECTOR Bench Case (Open-air chassis)
Operating System	Windows 11 Home 23H2

Thermals

Let’s get straight into thermal performance, and we’ll pick one of the six to represent the CryoFuze 5 to compare against other models. We can see that the CryoFuze 5 is on the hotter side of the spectrum, not quite as effective at transferring the heat as Cooler Master’s well-known MasterGel Maker paste, which leads in this comparison with the coolest temperatures under 250-watt load.

That being said, it did fare slightly better than CryoFuze Violet which at times breached the 90°C mark, while it mostly stays at 87-88°C on average. Granted, given adequate liquid cooling, they’re all capable of containing the heat with Core i9-13900K’s maximum power limits by default, but I imagine the CryoFuze 5 is more likely to find its way into more reasonable builds given its product positioning.

Verdict

As far as we’re aware, you can’t buy the entire bundle of the Cooler Master CryoFuze 5 at once, but you can buy individual units with the color of your choosing, which costs RM29 each. Frankly speaking, with the MasterGel Maker still available on the market and it being capable of conducting the heat better for the same price, it’s honestly a no-brainer to just forego the colors and fully commit to ‘function over form.’

Special thanks to Cooler Master Malaysia for providing the CryoFuze 5 thermal paste set for this review.