PS5 Teardown Explains Why It’s So Big – To Stay Cool and Quiet

Today’s official PlayStation 5 teardown told us a lot about the console, but perhaps the most interesting element was learning just how afraid Sony seems to have been about heat buildup in the new generation, and the lengths it’s gone to correct that. It even explains why PS5 is quite so massive.Clearly as sick of “my PS4 sounds like a jet engine” tweets as the rest of us, Sony appears to have thrown everything it can at the wall to help PS5 run cool and, thus, quietly. In the course of the teardown, we see multiple means of keeping the console cool:

• The entire rear side of the console is an exhaust port.
• A huge, 120mm x 45mm cooling fan, capable of drawing in air from both sides.
• Dust catching ports that have been built to withstand vacuuming.
• A liquid metal thermal conductor to keep the CPU and GPU cool.
• A large heatsink, using a heat pipe that achieves the same performance as a vapor chamber.

It’s a multi-pronged approach to reduce dust build-up and increase expelled heat, which should reduce noise overall (and that’s not confined to heat reduction either – even the Blu-Ray drive has been insulated to reduce vibration noise). Those elements make up the bulk of Sony engineer Yasuhiro Ootori’s explanations during the teardown video – it’s abundantly clear that Sony thought this was a major problem in PS4, and has sought to correct it for PS5.

There’s a case to be made, in fact, that the primary reason for PS5 being the skyscraper-sized object it is down to keeping it cool. Ootori makes clear that the size enables for a “dramatic improvement in performance in terms of processing power and quietness.” The only system element the width of the console is that fan, and the heatsink takes up a huge portion of the rest of the internal space.

It might not fit quite as nicely in your TV stand as previous boxes, but PS5 should at the very least be quiet once it’s in there.

PS5 will cost US$499 / £449 / AU$750 for the full edition, and US$399 / £359 / AU$600 for the digital edition. It will arrive on November 12 in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea and November 19 in all other territories.

PS5 preorders are currently sold out at all major retailers, but make sure to follow the IGN Deals Twitter page to be alerted the moment they go live again.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.