PlayStation released a teardown video on Wednesday of the PlayStation 5, giving viewers a better look at the size, capabilities and build of their next generation console.
During the teardown Yasuhiro Ootori, Vice President of the mechanical design department at Sony Interactive Entertainment, removed both white side panels from the console, revealing a double-sided 120mm cooling fan. The 24 mm thick cooling fan is capable of drawing in air from both sides of the console. The PlayStation 5 also has two dust catchers on both sides underneath the white paneling. Owners can vacuum these holes to remove dust from the console.
With games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare managing to take up 250 gigabytes on their own, storage expansion will be important for next generation players who want to play more than four games at a time. Ootori showed off the PlayStation 5’s expansion port, with M.2 interfacing and PCIe 4.0 support. The expansion bay is easily accessible when the white paneling was removed.
After showing off the cooling system and expansion bay, Ootori started the real tear down. While removing the white panels was as easy as snapping them out of place, Ootori used a series of screwdrivers to break the console down further. Before you go tearing down your own PlayStation 5, keep in mind that doing so past the initial white paneling will invalidate your warranty.
If you opted for the PlayStation 5 with a disc drive, you’ll be happy to know that it comes completely covered in a sheet metal case. This, combined with two layers of insulators helps reduce noise from the drive and vibration as the disc spins.
Ootori continued his teardown, and the PlayStation 5 motherboard manifested itself from under a thin metal sheet. The new console uses an AMD Ryzen Zen 2 processor with 8 cores and 16 threads, and clocks in at 3.5 GHz. The GPU is an AMC Radeon and clocks in at 2.23 GHz while delivering 10.3 TFLOPS. For memory, 8 GDDR6 chips with a maximum bandwidth of 448GB per second and a total of 16 GB are arranged in an octagon pattern around the CPU.
The PlayStation 5 has no hard disk drive, instead opting for an 825GB solid state drive. The motherboard also has a custom solid state drive controller, that can boost read speeds up to 5.5GB per second.
To keep all of these components cool and working together, the PlayStation 5 uses a liquid metal as the thermal interface metal. Ootori said that they spent over two years preparing for the adoption of this liquid cooling mechanism. Working with an impressively large heatsink, it should help keep PlayStation 5s cool for long periods of use.
With the now disassembled PlayStation 5 scattered about him, the teardown was complete and the video ended. You can check out the full teardown for yourself below.
Nicolas Perez is an editorial intern at Paste and opinion co-editor for New University. He’s rambling on Twitter @Nic_Perez__.