As we draw near to its inevitable November 12 release this year, Sony Interactive Entertainment is doing everything in its power to hype the PlayStation 5. And IT’S WORKING. Their latest effort: having VP of Mechanical Design, Yasuhiro Ootori, bust out his tools and dismantle the console by hand:
Playstation 5 Teardown
After a brief overview of the console’s measurements (104mm wide, 390mm high, and 260mm deep), various ports, and outer hardware, Ooroti begins the teardown.
Compared to the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5 looks a heck of a lot easier to take apart. You need only to pop open the two face plates to access the ventilation fan. Since the PS4’s fan was infamous for sounding like a jet engine, the PS5 has a fan that cools the system from both sides as well as dust catcher holes to make cleaning it out with a vacuum easier.
Apart from the cooling fan, popping the face plates allows easy access to the PS5’s M.2 interface with PCIe 4.0 support. This makes storage expansion just as easy as it was with the PS4, which required a separate hard drive to be installed inside or through one of its USB ports.
These are the only two components of the PS5 you can meddle with without voiding the console’s warranty. To complete the full disassembly, Ootori has to remove the warranty stickers on the screws before taking his tools to the PlayStation 5.
He starts by removing the double-sided cooling fan, which measures 120mm in diameter and is 45mm thick, followed by the console’s Ultra HD Blu-ray drive unit. The drive unit casing deserves special mention as it is covered in sheet metal to reduce noise and vibration when a disc is being read.
Ootori then removes the cables, shielding, and eventually the heart of the PlayStation 5: the x86-64-AMD Ryzen “Zen 2” CPU. 8 cores and 16 threads power this new console, allowing it to run up to 3.5GHz. The GPU on the other hand, can go up to 2.23GHz and output up to 10.3 teraflops. For memory, the PS5 has a 16GB GDDR6 which has a max bandwidth of 448GB per second. All your game saves, videos, photos, and the like are stored on the console’s onboard 825GB SSD.
Sony Interactive Entertainment seems to have put cooling and noise reduction at the forefront this time around. Apart from the dual-sided cooling fan and the sheet metal around the drive unit, they have also incorporated liquid metal as a thermal conductor to reduce the heat build-up over long periods of time. To finish the disassembly, Ootori removes the heat sink and the 350W power supply.
Unlike other YouTube disassembly videos which have the hosts screaming nonsense into your ears, this was a very professional and oddly calming breakdown of a brand-new console. After seeing it physically dismantled, I kind of want to do the same with my PlayStation 5 when I inevitably get my hands on one. You?
