Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) have shared a teardown video of the PlayStation 5, revealing more about the upcoming next gen console.
As a reminder; the console will launch November 12th in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. For the rest of the world, it will launch November 19th. The PlayStation 5 will cost $499.99, while the Digital Edition will cost $399.99.
Masayasu Ito (SIE Executive Vice President, Hardware Engineering and Operation) explains on the PlayStation Blog that conceptualizing began in 2015, which led to the consoles’ “beautifully designed architecture” over five years.
One thing highlighted by Ito and in the video is the consoles’ new mechanisms to make it operate more quietly. Japanese publications 4Gamer and Dengeki both praised the system’s new quiet fan in hands-on previews.
Dengeki stated “the quietness of the fans was more impressive than the loading times.” 4Gamer had similar thoughts, stating “the breeze from the exhaust port was light, and I could barely hear what I believe to have been the fan rotation.” Combined with how a home environment was likely to be cooler than their office, 4Gamer stated it is ” quite likely that the PS5’s exhaust will not be terribly loud.”
(Translation: Video Games Chronicle)
The teardown video features Yasuhiro Ootori (Vice President, Mechanical Design Dept., Hardware Design Division), which you can find below.
The video states the console is 10.4cm wide, 39cm high, and 26cm deep- admittedly taller than the PlayStation 4. The consoles large size, combined with the above thumbnail showing it seemingly larger than Ootori’s torso, has led to jokes and memes on social media [1, 2, 3, 4].
The console features USB Type-C and Type-A ports with HiSpeed USB support at the front, and two Type-A ports with SuperSpeed USB support at the rear. The rear also features the LAN port, HDMI port and power port.
Between the black “core” and white panels are the two air vents, along with the entire rear being an exhaust port. To be placed horizontally, the screw holding the base in place must be removed, and adjusted to act as a stand when horizontal. This has lead to some slight mockery from Xbox UK, tweeting a “guide” for placing the Xbox Series X horizontally.
Ootori reveals the panels can be removed by users, being slipped off via its corners. This has led to speculation that SIE will sell different colored and themed PlayStation 5 plates, or at least there being third-party custom plates sold [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
The 120mm diameter, 45mm thick cooling fan is shown near the top (when vertical), drawing in air from both sides of the console. The console also features two dust catchers, and M.2 interface with PCIe 4.0 support for storage expansion.
The teardown proper reveals the PlayStation 5’s various components. These are the basis for the boasted lighting fast loading times (via an 825GB SSD with 5.5GB per second raw data transfer rates), 4K graphics, and backwards compatible with 99% of PlayStation 4 games. The DualSense controller also offers haptic feedback, 3D audio, and adaptive triggers.
The console also features an Ultra HD Blu-ray Drive Unit (covered in sheet metal case and mounted with two layers of insulators to reduce drive noise and vibration), a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 antenna, and an eight core x86-64-AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU (with 16 threads that can run up to 3.5 GHz).
Finally, it features AMD Radeon RDNA 2-based GPU (2.23 Ghz and 10.3 TFLOPS), eight GDDR6 (maximum bandwidth 448GB per second), a liquid metal-based thermal conducter, a heat-pipe based heat-sink (said to perform as well as heat-sinks with a vapor chamber), and a 350W power supply unit.
