We finally got to sniff scented thermal paste — and we got it on video

Thermal paste, the heat-transferring goop that goes between a computer chip and whatever you’re using to cool it down, is boring. Does it work? Is it efficient? That’s all I care to know. But PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray, veteran technology journalist and scent savant, has been hunting scented thermal paste for years. He found it at Computex 2025.

ID-Cooling is the vendor, Frost X55 is the paste. It’s being offered in five different scents: Luna, Viola, Bella, Poma, and unscented. If you want to watch Adam shove little capsules of smelly chemicals under his nose, see below for the video. Enjoy.

The specific “flavors” of scent aren’t often hitting the mark. “I don’t mean to be mean, it’s not a bad scent, but it kinda smells like diapers,” said Adam when sniffing the Viola flavor, which is supposed to be floral. “No, no, no, no, no, a clean diaper, let me clarify! A clean diaper is what it smells like, not a dirty diaper!”

ID-Cooling will be selling the paste in the usual squeeze tubes. But I wonder how much of the scent will actually make its way into the room after you’ve used it in a desktop PC. “I’d be willing to pay extra for comparable, or maybe even less performance, just to get this scent in my house,” says Adam.

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