PS5 Teardown Video

[EricHiggin]

hinch said:

EricHiggin said:

PS4/Pro left vs PS5 right. The top right portion of the PS5 heatsink looks to be quite similar in size and shape to the PS4/Pro heatsink. That's only around 1/3 of the entire PS5 heatsink.

PS4 left vs PS5 right. Pro and PS3 Slim uses a 95mm fan though both don't look as wide. I thought PS3 fat was bigger yet, though it may be 95mm as well. PS5 uses a 120mm fan and a wide one at that.

PS4 carbon based thermal paste (+ cleaned) vs PS5 liquid metal thermal paste with leak barrier.

Quite impressive in it's own way. Little reason to think this thing will ever get to a point that's unacceptably too noisy for the overwhelming majority. I wonder cost wise, how expensive these items are vs XBSX? The heatsink isn't vapor chamber, only having heat pipes, but it's considerably larger than XBSX. The fan sizes are similar between both, though different style fans. The liquid metal cannot be all that cheap but if it's being mass manufactured at this level it's likely cheaper than one might assume. XBSX could be using a higher end carbon based paste which should still cost less.

Now just tell me I don't need a recently released NVMe SSD just to store and transfer games. It does say, "with PCIe 4.0 support" so hopefully lesser is ok if you don't mind transferring to the onboard SSD. What are the odds the grey SSD cover plate has a thermal pad on the back so that it get's used as a heatsink as well?

Reminds me a lot of the PS3 higher end build quality overall, without any of the heat issues. As far as we can tell for now anyway. It certainly gives the impression it's worth $500.

The coolers or heatsinks shouldn't be hugely different in price. Reason being vapour chamber coolers are generally more expensive to produce due to the way they are manufactured. Which is most likely why sony opted for standard heatpipes and more aluminum fins for extra cooling capacity. Like they stated if you have enough heatpipes in contact with the heatspreader its offers similar performance - at a cheaper price. Additionally they are able to cover a larger portion of the PCB if there are other components like VRM's, NAND/controllers and other parts to cool.

Thermal material cost will be pennies difference for companies, the cost to add it to each board is what I feel is the actual cost differentiator but assuming they have the manufacturing down to a T it shouldn't be an issue. But yeah adding liquid metal to each machine is more complex than adding some thermal compound to the heatspreader and attaching a heatsink.

I think the grey plate is just a cover, probably to protect the I/O or SSD from dust.

It's just hard to believe that, that much metal, can be a lot cheaper. $1.00 on 100 million consoles though is a lot if that were the savings for that part. I figured it must have been considerably cheaper (en masse) to go that route. I didn't consider tying other components into the vast spread of heatsink.

Well I just wonder if the PS5 rumor of going with a more expensive cooling item was the liquid metal. It's really unlikely the fan was smaller or had really cheap bearings/bushings, and the next step up for a heatsink would basically be a vapor chamber. I wonder if they were planning on either liquid metal or a high end carbon based paste? Another rumor said they were still having some heat issues earlier this year. Maybe the carbon based paste wasn't allowing enough heat transfer and it was causing the fan to ramp up too much, causing unacceptable noise as per their goal? They may have spent 2 years working on the liquid metal idea just in case, but if it ended up considerably more expensive, it would still be a question of whether to use it or something cheaper if they could.

I'd guess the NVMe slot plate is more so for anti interference like how the rest of the mobo is covered except for the wifi. I don't see why they wouldn't use the metal shield as a heatsink as well. Otherwise you could probably get away with leaving the metal shield off and applying a slim heatsink to the NVMe stick.

Last edited by EricHiggin - on 08 October 2020