PlayStation 5 Teardown: up-close and personal, console uses liquid metal TIM

Wanna know what the PS5 looks like from the inside? Well, Sony figured, let's beat all others and post a video about it. Some interesting observations can be made.

Sony to post a teardown themselves. The PlayStation 5 console absolutely is distinctive from the last generation. Very refreshing to see is all the cooling, in two-fold. The first being a 120 mm wide, 45 mm thick blower fan cooling the vapor chamber heatsink. However, once you dig a little deeper, you can see that Sony applies liquid metal thermal interface material (TIM) instead of regular thermal paste for heat transfer. That's a pretty progressive choice to make, as normally you need to re-apply liquid metal TIM regularly. Under one of the panels is a space where a PCIe 4.0 SSD of the M.2 format can be installed. Sony has previously said that users can expand the storage with NVMe SSDs, but they must meet certain speed requirements. Details on this have not yet been disclosed.

The soc is soldered to the motherboard and uses with liquid metal as thermal paste. Sony states it has worked for two years on implementing that material. On top of the motherboard is a large heatsink with heat pipes, which cools the soc and the memory chips as well as the SSD. The SSD consists of a controller and separate memory chips, which are also soldered to the motherboard. Yasuhiro Ootori, head of Sony’s mechanical design for the PS5, motivates the teardown in Japanese, noting that the entire rear of the PS5 is designed to exhaust air out of the console.

A 350W power supply is built into the console. Sony’s teardown video also exposes just how serviceable this console will be. It’s obvious that Sony has thoughtfully created this to make reparability and serviceability smooth.