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PS5 teardown video demonstrates a full disassembly of the console

In the PlayStation 5 teardown video, Sony shows much of the individual components, including motherboard, heatsink, cooling fan, and more.

TJ Denzer

October 7, 2020 8:15 AM

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This morning brought some very interesting information about the PlayStation 5. Out of the blue, Sony decided to launch an entire PS5 teardown video showcasing a full disassembly of the console into its main components, along with some information on each. We get to see the full internals of the PS5, including the cooling fan, motherboard, heatsink, power unit, and more.

Sony launched the PS5 teardown video on the PlayStation Twitter account on October 7, 2020. The slightly more than 7-minute-long video features Mechanical Design Department VP Yasuhiro Ootori doing a full disassembly of the consoles and some description of its individual components. We learned some interesting factoids during the teardown. For instance, the base plate of the PS5 contains screw and hinge mechanisms. The screw must be used to keep the PS5 in upright mode while the PS5’s plates must be snapped into the base plate’s hinges to lay sideways. Ootori also gave a close look at the front and back, the former of which has one USB Type-A port and one USB Type-C port. The back features two USB Type-A ports with SuperSpeed USB support, a LAN port, an HDMI Out port, and a power port.

The official PS5 teardown video is here: https://t.co/dPEprfNKQX

Get up-close and personal with PS5's next-generation technology, a culmination of five years of design and development. pic.twitter.com/9AZowwJKPz

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) October 7, 2020

Once Ootori goes into the internals of the PS5, we get to see the housing for an M.2 SSD interface that has PCle 4.0 support for future storage possibilities. The cooling fan is a 120mm diameter, 45mm thick, double-sided air intake fan, built to drawn in air and cooling from both sides of the PS5. Meanwhile, the Ultra HD Blue-ray drive unit features an all-around sheet metal casing around two layers of insulation to ensure as little vibration and noise as possible. The heatsink is also shown, featuring a heat pipe similar to PS3 and PS4 designs, but with an overall improved design built to deliver performance similar to a vapor chamber. Finally for the larger components, the power unit of the PS5 is shown, rated at 350W.

Meanwhile, we got an official look at the motherboard which features a number of components that were both known and unknown leading up tot his video. This might be our first official look at the x86-64-AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU running the system, which features an 8 core, 16 thread build and runs at up to 3.5 GHz. We also get a look at the RDNA 2-based AMD Radeon GPU, which is said to run up to 2.23 GHz and can deliver up to 10.3 TFLOPS. Additionally, it showcases 8 GDDR6 SDRAM chips (for a total system memory of 16GB) for a supposed maximum bandwidth of 448GB per second.

Also on the motherboard is a built-in 825GB SSD for storage, perhaps one of the most talked-about improvements in the PS5's specs. The custom SSD controller installed alongside it is built to deliver read speeds of raw data transfer rates as fast as 5.5GB per second. One of the more interesting components of the PS5 is the SoC (system on chip), which features a high clock rate and a liquid metal cooling system as the thermal conductor to ensure steady performance between the SoC and heatsink. Ootori mentions that the high thermals of the PS5 demanded this liquid metal cooling system and it took the team over two years to adapt.

The break down of the PlayStation 5’s internals were illuminating to say the least. Where Sony has previously been very cagey about the components of its system, this one laid out everything under the hood on the table. With the system launching on November 12, 2020, there’s little else to learn, but we’ll be seeing what all of this tech amounts to soon enough.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.