8 ms·

Sony’s new PS5 model weighs less because it has a smaller heatsink

43 points by billyharris 5y ago

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I'm kinda worried because the reason they did that was the PS4 sounded liked a damn jet taking off everytime.
desperate 5y ago
“I don’t think there’s any argument that this is a worse console, at least for thermals and for cooling,” says Evans. Worst quote they coulda pulled. Literally sends the opposite message than the one its meant to convey. Unless im even worse at english than i thought.
- setr 5y ago
  It was intentionally negative — Evans is the guy discovering the smaller heatsink; not Sony PR. The full quote is “I don’t think there’s any argument that this is a worse console, at least for thermals and for cooling,” says Evans. “As far as I’m concerned I’d rather have a launch PS5.”
- sp332 5y ago
  It is ambiguous, but it means that this is obviously true and there's no argument about it.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  It's arguably an ambiguous statement.
- whydid 5y ago
  Ambiguous and indirect double-negative
- sseagull 5y ago
  Don’t think of “argument” meaning a statement in support of something. Think of it as a synonym for “debate”. “There’s no debate” as in “it’s so obvious, there’s no one on the other side debating that it is not true”
- ErneX 5y ago
  The guys from gamersnexus say measuring exhaust temperature is not enough to call this worse. So Austin Evans is probably reaching. Edit: wrote his name wrong.
H1Supreme 5y ago
> with rear exhaust temperatures around 3 to 5 degrees higher Is that C or F? I'm going to assume Fahrenheit. Also, is that bad? In other words, did they measure the rest of the unit to see if it was hotter or cooler? Maybe they've directed more heat to the exhaust. Which is the whole point, after all.
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  It's C. In terms of if it's bad? shrug. With a smaller heat sink, the chips are almost certainly going to be hotter (dunno how much.. at least 3-5 degrees, maybe up to 10?). Does that matter? Tech youtubers love to emphasize cooling - which is fair, I think it's important, but I also think it's overdone. From the end-user standpoint, the question is does this meaningfully increase the rate that their unit thermal throttles (the PS5 uses boost just like modern laptops/PCs... the xbox and ps4 did not) in like... 95 (or whatever threshold) percentile shitty (so like stuffed in a cabinet with air flow being impinged) environments. Because of boost variability, it's gonna be kinda annoying to do true side by side performance comparisons. At the very least, you'd need to swap cooling solutions on the same silicon. No idea how feasible that is with the PS5 design.
  - kjaftaedi 5y ago
    I think for the end user the primary concern is not performance, but the potential fan noise. If the performance goes up or down, end users might not even notice, but if the fan is constantly kicking in and being too loud too often, more people will be concerned.
    - ErneX 5y ago
      Agreed, this would be the main concern, since it's one the things people hated about the PS4 and PS4 Pro (being really loud). I don't think Sony would want a regression there either.
    - icegreentea2 5y ago
      That's fair. I think the fan noise consideration is interesting because it's possible (depending on fan and load characteristics) to run the fan more (as in % duty on at "high" speed) and not meaningfully effect the perception enjoyment since it's often the fan noise changing (not the fan noise itself... though obviously this depends on how obnoxious the fan noise) that is annoying, not the fan noise itself. I don't own any of these consoles, so I can't really say first hand, but for my Xbox One (the og one), I just know that I notice when the fans kick in... and then I just get absorbed into the game (and game noise).
CoolGuySteve 5y ago
My PS5 already overheats if I play a PS5 game on it with my cabinet door closed. It was never an issue with my PS4 Slim, PS3, or XBox 360. All in all I think it's the worst designed console I've ever had. The curvy top makes controllers slide off while they're charging so I had to put a drawer liner on top. The white plastic overhang seems delicate, I have no idea how I'd ever pack the thing up without breaking it. And when mounted horizontally, the stand falls off every time I move the console. What's wrong with built in feet?
- NonContro 5y ago
  Presumably a 5nm 'slim' version is just 1-2 years away, the PS4 'Slim' was released in 2016 on 16nm, which is the same timeframe as 16nm GPUs were released.
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  Yeah, this generation of consoles are much more power hungry than their predecessors (you can just see that in their designs). PS5 draws like ~220W from the wall, Series X draws like 200+. The 360 draws like ~120W.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    The 360 also has a 32th of the memory and a 50th of the graphical performance. If you prioritize power draw over performance you can always continue using the old consoles.
  - LeSaucy 5y ago
    Does the power usage scale with resolution? Do games have "run at 1080p vs 4K but cooler/less power" option?
    - criddell 5y ago
      I would think so. About 12 years ago I would use a lava lamp screen saver on my Linux machine. Out of curiosity, I measured the power draw of my computer idling with a blank screen and with the lava lamp animation. The animation was drawing something like 30 watts whereas a physical lava lamp uses a 25 watt bulb.
christkv 5y ago
I presume they are cost cutting where they can as material prices have been very high recently. The heat sink seems like a likely candidate where they can save money.
kabdib 5y ago
Consoles have design lifetimes, and thermals are part of the computation that helps you figure out if your components are going to last as long as the warranty. Obviously, if you run a chip hot, its service life will be reduced. So companies develop models that tell them how long things like the SOC (main chip with CPU, etc.) will last for a given temperature and use frequency, and whether or not they've got a 1-year design on their hands, or one that will last 20 years. The model improves as you gain experience with manufacturing, customer issues, and get more testing than you could do before launch. Making the systems too beefy can be expensive, and saving pennies really matters when you're making millions of units. So I imagine that the folks at Sony determined they could get away with a smaller heatsink and still have an acceptable fleet failure rate, probably a year or two out from the posted warranty.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Hopefully the industry has improved their estimates since the Xbox 360
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Starting with the original PlayStation in 1994, nevermind all of the other hardware Sony makes since way before that, they just might have a bit more experience making consoles than Microsoft did in 2010 with the 360. (though to be fair, the original Xbox was released in 2001.)
  - samhuk 5y ago
    I can't get a source for this right now, but I remember having a very intriguing conversation about heat issues and the xbox 360 years ago. I was talking to an old colleague of mine that was an electronics engineer, and apparently, the issue with the xbox 360 was that the heat inside the case made the solder a bit more softer than expected. This would not be an issue for a horizontally positioned xbox 360, but when placed on it's side (which a lot of people did), this caused extremely slow shifting of certain components on the motherboard towards the direction of gravity. After (for most people) a few years, certain components would shift enough to not have proper contact with the board. I was offered the analogy of the long-standing pitch viscocity experiment - everything is technically a liquid, just to wildly different degrees. Not sure if this is true though, it was many years ago!
freemint 5y ago
Saving weight probably saves some money in transport, materials and assembly. If this saving is made to offset raising component prices all the better. Once a homebrew becomes available models with a bigger cooler might be worth more though.
karmakaze 5y ago
I remember a similar thing with the original PS/3 vs follow-up revisions. The fan on that original was killer--so large, slow and quiet, dangerously sharp edges too (does that help with noise?).
_prototype_ 5y ago
Reminds me of this recent story on Reddit where a Xbox Series X overheats and blows up: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/pdvcct/my_xbox_series_x_exploded_almost_killing_my_cat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/pdvcct/my_xbox_seri... I will be skipping this generation. Not that it matters anyway, these consoles are impossible to find and buy, at least this will continue to be the case well into 2022.
- Arn_Thor 5y ago
  OP removed their post. The comment section is a slaughter, with people calling shenanigans. I'd agree with the skeptics, I can't imagine what inside the console would blow up like that. The PSU is the most likely culprit, but it won't do anywhere near that kind of damage. Look at GamersNexus overloading a 750 watt PC PSU, vastly more chunky than an Xbox Series X pulling something like 170 watts at most: https://youtu.be/7JmPUr-BeEM https://youtu.be/7JmPUr-BeEM A pop and a fizz but nothing that would do more than startle someone and maybe, in an absolute worst-case scenario set fire to some accumulated cat hair.
fomine3 5y ago
Shrinking PlayStation is tradition for Sony, but I believe they mostly did when their chips are also shrunk. Possibly they found that current cooling solution is a bit overkill. Personally I prefer overkill.

43 points by billyharris 5y ago

I'm kinda worried because the reason they did that was the PS4 sounded liked a damn jet taking off everytime.

“I don’t think there’s any argument that this is a worse console, at least for thermals and for cooling,” says Evans. Worst quote they coulda pulled. Literally sends the opposite message than the one its meant to convey. Unless im even worse at english than i thought.

setr 5y ago
It was intentionally negative — Evans is the guy discovering the smaller heatsink; not Sony PR. The full quote is “I don’t think there’s any argument that this is a worse console, at least for thermals and for cooling,” says Evans. “As far as I’m concerned I’d rather have a launch PS5.”
sp332 5y ago
It is ambiguous, but it means that this is obviously true and there's no argument about it.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
It's arguably an ambiguous statement.
whydid 5y ago
Ambiguous and indirect double-negative
sseagull 5y ago
Don’t think of “argument” meaning a statement in support of something. Think of it as a synonym for “debate”. “There’s no debate” as in “it’s so obvious, there’s no one on the other side debating that it is not true”
ErneX 5y ago
The guys from gamersnexus say measuring exhaust temperature is not enough to call this worse. So Austin Evans is probably reaching. Edit: wrote his name wrong.

H1Supreme 5y ago

> with rear exhaust temperatures around 3 to 5 degrees higher Is that C or F? I'm going to assume Fahrenheit. Also, is that bad? In other words, did they measure the rest of the unit to see if it was hotter or cooler? Maybe they've directed more heat to the exhaust. Which is the whole point, after all.

icegreentea2 5y ago
It's C. In terms of if it's bad? shrug. With a smaller heat sink, the chips are almost certainly going to be hotter (dunno how much.. at least 3-5 degrees, maybe up to 10?). Does that matter? Tech youtubers love to emphasize cooling - which is fair, I think it's important, but I also think it's overdone. From the end-user standpoint, the question is does this meaningfully increase the rate that their unit thermal throttles (the PS5 uses boost just like modern laptops/PCs... the xbox and ps4 did not) in like... 95 (or whatever threshold) percentile shitty (so like stuffed in a cabinet with air flow being impinged) environments. Because of boost variability, it's gonna be kinda annoying to do true side by side performance comparisons. At the very least, you'd need to swap cooling solutions on the same silicon. No idea how feasible that is with the PS5 design.
- kjaftaedi 5y ago
  I think for the end user the primary concern is not performance, but the potential fan noise. If the performance goes up or down, end users might not even notice, but if the fan is constantly kicking in and being too loud too often, more people will be concerned.
  - ErneX 5y ago
    Agreed, this would be the main concern, since it's one the things people hated about the PS4 and PS4 Pro (being really loud). I don't think Sony would want a regression there either.
  - icegreentea2 5y ago
    That's fair. I think the fan noise consideration is interesting because it's possible (depending on fan and load characteristics) to run the fan more (as in % duty on at "high" speed) and not meaningfully effect the perception enjoyment since it's often the fan noise changing (not the fan noise itself... though obviously this depends on how obnoxious the fan noise) that is annoying, not the fan noise itself. I don't own any of these consoles, so I can't really say first hand, but for my Xbox One (the og one), I just know that I notice when the fans kick in... and then I just get absorbed into the game (and game noise).

CoolGuySteve 5y ago

My PS5 already overheats if I play a PS5 game on it with my cabinet door closed. It was never an issue with my PS4 Slim, PS3, or XBox 360. All in all I think it's the worst designed console I've ever had. The curvy top makes controllers slide off while they're charging so I had to put a drawer liner on top. The white plastic overhang seems delicate, I have no idea how I'd ever pack the thing up without breaking it. And when mounted horizontally, the stand falls off every time I move the console. What's wrong with built in feet?

NonContro 5y ago
Presumably a 5nm 'slim' version is just 1-2 years away, the PS4 'Slim' was released in 2016 on 16nm, which is the same timeframe as 16nm GPUs were released.
icegreentea2 5y ago
Yeah, this generation of consoles are much more power hungry than their predecessors (you can just see that in their designs). PS5 draws like ~220W from the wall, Series X draws like 200+. The 360 draws like ~120W.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  The 360 also has a 32th of the memory and a 50th of the graphical performance. If you prioritize power draw over performance you can always continue using the old consoles.
- LeSaucy 5y ago
  Does the power usage scale with resolution? Do games have "run at 1080p vs 4K but cooler/less power" option?
  - criddell 5y ago
    I would think so. About 12 years ago I would use a lava lamp screen saver on my Linux machine. Out of curiosity, I measured the power draw of my computer idling with a blank screen and with the lava lamp animation. The animation was drawing something like 30 watts whereas a physical lava lamp uses a 25 watt bulb.

christkv 5y ago

I presume they are cost cutting where they can as material prices have been very high recently. The heat sink seems like a likely candidate where they can save money.

kabdib 5y ago

Consoles have design lifetimes, and thermals are part of the computation that helps you figure out if your components are going to last as long as the warranty. Obviously, if you run a chip hot, its service life will be reduced. So companies develop models that tell them how long things like the SOC (main chip with CPU, etc.) will last for a given temperature and use frequency, and whether or not they've got a 1-year design on their hands, or one that will last 20 years. The model improves as you gain experience with manufacturing, customer issues, and get more testing than you could do before launch. Making the systems too beefy can be expensive, and saving pennies really matters when you're making millions of units. So I imagine that the folks at Sony determined they could get away with a smaller heatsink and still have an acceptable fleet failure rate, probably a year or two out from the posted warranty.

xxpor 5y ago
Hopefully the industry has improved their estimates since the Xbox 360
- fragmede 5y ago
  Starting with the original PlayStation in 1994, nevermind all of the other hardware Sony makes since way before that, they just might have a bit more experience making consoles than Microsoft did in 2010 with the 360. (though to be fair, the original Xbox was released in 2001.)
- samhuk 5y ago
  I can't get a source for this right now, but I remember having a very intriguing conversation about heat issues and the xbox 360 years ago. I was talking to an old colleague of mine that was an electronics engineer, and apparently, the issue with the xbox 360 was that the heat inside the case made the solder a bit more softer than expected. This would not be an issue for a horizontally positioned xbox 360, but when placed on it's side (which a lot of people did), this caused extremely slow shifting of certain components on the motherboard towards the direction of gravity. After (for most people) a few years, certain components would shift enough to not have proper contact with the board. I was offered the analogy of the long-standing pitch viscocity experiment - everything is technically a liquid, just to wildly different degrees. Not sure if this is true though, it was many years ago!

freemint 5y ago

Saving weight probably saves some money in transport, materials and assembly. If this saving is made to offset raising component prices all the better. Once a homebrew becomes available models with a bigger cooler might be worth more though.

karmakaze 5y ago

I remember a similar thing with the original PS/3 vs follow-up revisions. The fan on that original was killer--so large, slow and quiet, dangerously sharp edges too (does that help with noise?).

_prototype_ 5y ago

Reminds me of this recent story on Reddit where a Xbox Series X overheats and blows up: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/pdvcct/my_xbox_series_x_exploded_almost_killing_my_cat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/pdvcct/my_xbox_seri... I will be skipping this generation. Not that it matters anyway, these consoles are impossible to find and buy, at least this will continue to be the case well into 2022.

Arn_Thor 5y ago
OP removed their post. The comment section is a slaughter, with people calling shenanigans. I'd agree with the skeptics, I can't imagine what inside the console would blow up like that. The PSU is the most likely culprit, but it won't do anywhere near that kind of damage. Look at GamersNexus overloading a 750 watt PC PSU, vastly more chunky than an Xbox Series X pulling something like 170 watts at most: https://youtu.be/7JmPUr-BeEM https://youtu.be/7JmPUr-BeEM A pop and a fizz but nothing that would do more than startle someone and maybe, in an absolute worst-case scenario set fire to some accumulated cat hair.

fomine3 5y ago

Shrinking PlayStation is tradition for Sony, but I believe they mostly did when their chips are also shrunk. Possibly they found that current cooling solution is a bit overkill. Personally I prefer overkill.