Here’s What Happens When You Use A Gummy Bear On Your PC CPU

A YouTube short shows exactly what happens when someone uses a gummy bear instead of thermal paste on their CPU. PCs can be delicate machines, so great care should always be taken when putting them together. Every single part has to fit just right and be made specifically for the PC. Unfortunately, the list of parts rarely ever includes gummy bears.

Thermal paste is used for a very specific reason. The thick, gray liquid helps distribute heat evenly so that the CPU cooler can then cool the CPU down efficiently. If a CPU cooler or thermal paste isn’t working properly, due to improper placement or another error, the CPU could overheat and cause serious damage to itself. A cooked CPU is absolutely no good and great care should be taken when setting up a PC’s components. A misplaced dot of thermal paste or an incorrectly installed cooler means that a several hundred-dollar processor could be done and might put the computer at risk.

So, what happens if no thermal paste is on hand? Can other thick, gooey substances be used to sufficiently disperse heat on a CPU? Well, mr yeester on YouTube decided to put the theory to the test. The video shows the PC builder gently placing a gummy bear down on the CPU once secured in its socket. Next, the YouTuber takes a CPU fan cooler, and pushes with more pressure than anyone would need for thermal paste then tightens it up. What happens next is not surprising in the least. As expected, the gummy bear heats up to the point where it completely melts underneath the cooler.

Why Didn’t A Gummy Bear Work?

A gummy bear is absolutely no replacement for thermal paste. In fact, there shouldn’t even have been a gummy bear near the open-air motherboard in the first place. Thermal paste is made up of very specific elements that allow the paste to keep its structure, even at high temperatures. In the video, the CPU gets up to 99 degrees Celsius or 210 Fahrenheit. Obviously, that’s insanely hot for a computer, meaning the gummy paste did nothing and started melting out of the sides, even finding its way into the socket. With a chip shortage still affecting the world, this hardly seems like a good idea.

Thermal paste also fills in the tiny microscopic cracks and features of a CPU and the cooler’s base plate, which allows heat to transfer from the processor to the cooler with ease. It’s more than likely that the little bubbles natural to the gummy bear-making process didn’t help create an efficient heat transfer. In fact, the gummy bear may have helped insulate the CPU, letting it climb in temperature until the software couldn’t read the temperature any longer. It doesn’t matter if it’s AMD or Intel, as mentioned in the YouTube video, don’t try this at home, and always use thermal paste instead.

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