SONY has already shown what the interior of its next-gen console, the PS5 , and we have finally been able to see what its internal components and their layout are like. One of the most interesting topics is the cooling system of this PS5, which we are going to analyze and see its potential to know whether or not it will have enough performance .
The AMD Zen 2 SoC with custom RDNA 2 graphics on the PS5 has a TDP of 150 watts, and it will not be easy to keep it at a good operating temperature while maintaining a low noise level, as one of the biggest complaints of users with respect to the previous generation of consoles was the noise that the PS4 made while playing, even going so far as to spoil the gaming experience. Of course, this is something that SONY has wanted to alleviate in the PS5 and they have put a lot of effort in ensuring that the cooling is not only adequate in terms of performance, but also in terms of emitted noise.
The PS5’s external cooling system
A good cooling of a device does not consist only in implementing a good heatsink, but must be complemented by a directed air flow; no matter how good a heatsink a device has, if it can’t “breathe” it will be of little use, right? To do this, SONY has implemented a fairly elaborate exterior ventilation system consisting of two parts; The first of these are the air intakes of the console, arranged in the front part.
And then the air vents, arranged behind a grill at the back of the console that occupies practically its entire height (or width if you have it lying down).
The positioning of the console by the user will therefore be very important, as they will have to make sure that the air is not covered or blocked both in front of and behind it.
If we remove the side covers of the console, something that can be done without tools and just by applying a little pressure as we have seen previously, we can see not only the huge blower type heatsink that it incorporates and that crosses the structure from side to side , but also some ventilation holes in the inner casing that allow hot air to escape through them.
Obviously these ventilation holes are arranged in key points, right at the outlet of the internal heatsink located on top of the components that generate the most heat, such as the SoC, the memory or the SSD.
The PS5 heatsink
The one in charge of cooling all the internal components is a large blower type heatsink; Although these are not exactly known, from the images we could say that it is probably between 100 and 120 mm in diameter and at least 80 mm thick, something that will give it an enormous capacity to move air, much needed due to the enormous size of the heatsink. made of copper and aluminum that it houses inside and that we will see in a moment.
The heatsink that SONY has mounted on its PS5 has really very large dimensions, and it occupies around a third of the total volume of the console. It has a base made entirely of copper to promote more efficient heat transmission, and one of the most interesting features is that it has an integrated IHS that makes direct contact with the SoC.
In addition, the contact that it makes with the SoC of the PS5 is through a term compound of liquid metal, which guarantees an extraordinarily good heat transfer and with a much lower degradation than if they had used conventional thermal paste.
The heatsink has, as we have said before, a base entirely made of copper, and to this three areas of aluminum sheets are welded for the three areas that generate the most heat: the SoC, the RAM and the SSD controller.
The heat is distributed in these three blocks of aluminum foil using six “shared” copper heat pipes, with four going through the elongated zone that goes to the controller, six are in the block for the SoC, and another four They go to the block in charge of RAM.
As you can see, the heatsink not only has large dimensions, but is also intelligently distributed to provide a huge surface area for heat dissipation.
By the external distribution of the grilles, as we have seen at the beginning, and by the location of the blower type fan in charge of moving the internal air circuit of the console, we can see that all the air will enter through the front grille of the PS5 but will come out. both from the rear and along the rest of the perimeter, cooling the console very efficiently as long as it is not covered or covered in any part of these areas.
Does this heatsink have enough performance?
The SoC of the PS5 has a TDP of 150 watts, and we can only extrapolate it to a PC to be able to assess whether this cooling system of the PS5 will be enough to keep the internal hardware of the console at a good temperature.
The heatsink it incorporates is much larger and has much more heat dissipation surface than what PC over-air heatsinks usually have, although it is also true that not many processors really go beyond 125W of TDP. However, this heatsink does not have one or more fans attached to the aluminum foil blocks but rather they depend on a single blower fan pushing the air through all the areas, so there is a loss of efficiency when expelling outside the heat, which will force the blower fan to rotate fast enough to move a lot of air, and this almost necessarily means that the console will emit a lot of noise, both from the speed of the fan itself and from the moving air.
In short, the cooling system that SONY has installed in the PS5 seems more than enough to keep the internal components of it at a good operating temperature, although everything indicates that this will be at the cost of not being able to maintain a low noise level.
