New grooves may address complaints of liquid metal leaking in the standard PS5.
New grooves may address complaints of liquid metal leaking in the standard PS5.
Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Wes Davis is a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.
Sony has published a new teardown of the PlayStation 5 Pro, highlighting improvements that it made to the cooling apparatus of the machine. They include tweaks to the PS5’s liquid metal cooling design aimed to give the console “more stable” cooling.
The changes follow unproven claims that the liquid metal used in the first PS5 can leak and damage the console. Some sites even recommended against keeping the PS5 vertical after a repair shop owner and YouTuber was partially misquoted by jailbreak site Wololo.net. Wololo later followed up, saying its original story contained a “critical misunderstanding” — ultimately, it doesn’t seem like this was ever a widespread issue.
Even so, Sony writes that it changed the design for the PS5 Pro, quoting Shinya Tsuchida, PS5 Pro Mechanical Design Lead:
We spent quite some time conducting research on insulation when we were designing the original PS5. The basic structure remains the same in the PS5 Pro, but we made some improvements by adding fine grooves where the liquid metal is applied, so that the cooling effect is more stable. When we were doing research for the original PS5, we anticipated that semiconductors would continue to advance and become much denser, so we believed liquid metal technology would become crucial. It turns out we were right, and it was integral when designing the PS5 Pro.
The rest of the blog post and its images may be familiar to you if you already saw iFixit’s teardown of Sony’s very expensive console, in which it noted that the inside of the PS5 Pro contains more thermal management than electronics.
Some of that includes a larger cooling fan that the company says has redesigned fan blades, including “smaller blades in between” them. The blog also explains why it’s so hard to see the traces on the PS5 Pro’s motherboard: the board hides extra electrical layers beneath, to speed up memory access.
