PS5 gets gruesome teardown, innards displayed for the world

Sony has been pretty quiet about the PS5 lately, then all of a sudden we get a surprise teardown, of all things.

VP of Mechanical Design Yasushiro Ootori personally disassembled the console to highlight some of its features. It’s a distinctly Japanese design, and there’s certainly a lot to love here.

First off, those bizarre white panels are easily removable by the end user, in a similar fashion to the hard drive cover on the PS4. They just clip in, and easily slide out. Which brings us to our first big surprise. The fan is now fully accessible, and removable, by the end user. This should make cleaning a breeze, if you pardon the pun.

Next to the fan, we also have a standard M.2 slot for storage upgrades. We know that only certain models will be officially supported. Sony has not clarified which ones. However, it is nice to see the company sticking with an off-the-shelf solution compared the the proprietary expansion modules that Microsoft is using for the Series X.

Diving deeper into the bowels of the system, we also get a good look at the motherboard. Once again we’re using an AMD APU design, which combines both the eight Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 graphics processor into a single package.

It’s certainly a big boy, that needs some equally beefy cooling. Which thankfully Sony has delivered upon. We get a vapor chamber heatsink typical of those found on PC graphics cards. Paired up with that massive fan, it should tame those hot chips. It also explains why the PS5 is so large. Much like the original PS3, most of the internal space is dedicated to cooling.

One of the more interesting features is the use of “liquid metal” instead of standard thermal compound. It’s not a new technology, having seen sporadic use in the PC modding community for a couple years now. It’s made from a non-toxic metal alloy that has a very low melting point. Typically gallium. It’s difficult to work with, which is why it hasn’t seen widespread use, but it conducts heat far better than traditional ceramic or silver-based pastes. So it seems Sony has gone above and beyond to ensure the PS5 keeps its cool at all times.

We also got a peek at the 16GB of GDDR6 feeding the processor with data. On the backside, the SSD chips have been soldered directly to the board. Which is something that’s not exactly ideal, since those chips will wear out over time, and cannot be replaced by the end user unlike last gen storage. A custom controller powers the whole flash array in order to ensure those lightning fast transfer speeds Sony is promising.

Powering this all is a 350w power supply. Which is certainly a lot larger than we’ve seen in past consoles. Though it is still smaller than the phat PS3, which boasted 380w unit. It’s likely that actual power consumption will be a lot less than what it’s rated for.

For connectivity, the PS5 will feature a 10gbps USB Type-C port on the front, along with a standard issue USB 2.0 port. On the back, we get two additional USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, and HDMI 2.0. It does lack the proprietary PlayStation Camera port. However, Sony has promised to provide a free adapter to all PlayStation VR owners.

Lastly, lets talk about that stand, because this is one impressive little bit of engineering that is so uniquely Japanese that you just have to admire it. The console is meant to stand vertically. The stand screws into the side to do so. Should you want to place it horizontally, no worries. The stand unscrews from the side, and just clips to the bottom. What really got me is that Sony has included this little door on the underside of the stand to store the screw when in horizontal mode. Not only that, but there’s a little plug to hide the screw hole too. Again just going that extra mile.

The PS5, like all PlayStation consoles, is an exceptionally well designed piece of kit. Everything is tightly packed and has its place, but it’s still modular and easy to repair. Something which is becoming a rarity in consumer electronics these days. Most of my misgivings with the PlayStation brand come from the software and service side, but I can’t help with being impressed by the hardware.

The PlayStation 5 will officially release in North America on November 12th of this year.