Building your own PC is a fun learning experience which requires that most messy of substances: thermal paste. The tube it comes in looks like a syringe, or at least it did. Cooler Master is shifting away from the syringe design and blaming parents for the change.

As Ars Technica reports, it’s hard to tell if the reference to parents is a joke or serious, but you can judge the tweet below for yourself and if nothing else it’s a great marketing line. The old tube applicator does look like a syringe and sure, some parents could jump to the wrong conclusion if they aren’t so engaged with their child to know they are building a PC.

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. pic.twitter.com/ClyZLDDFe9

— Cooler Master (@CoolerMaster) January 16, 2020

The existing tube design saw the thermal paste ejected in a thin line, where as the redesign offers a much broader ejection from a flat nozzle. I’ve always used the “pea-sized blob in the middle of the chip” method of paste application, which this new flat nozzle makes much harder to achieve. We’ll have to wait for some reviews to see how good or bad this spreading method really is for thermal performance.

Cooler Master is offering three versions of its thermal paste/grease in this redesigned applicator. They are called Mastergel Maker, Mastergel Pro, and Mastergel Regular. The only difference between the three is the thermal conductivity performance on offer, which is measured in Watts per meter-Kelvin (W/m-K). The higher the W/m-K, the better the conductivity.

Mastergel Regular achieves 5W/m-K, where as Mastergel Pro pushes that up to 8W/m-K. The top performer is the Mastergel Maker paste, though, which manages 11W/m-K. Regardless of which one you choose, the applicator contains 1.5ml of thermal paste and comes with a cleaning cloth for removing any existing grease from the chip surface before application.