Enlarge / Old PS5 heatsink on the left, new “11-series” PS5 heatsink on the right. (credit: Austin Evans)
Last month, Sony began shipping a lightly revised version of its PlayStation 5 console with a smaller, lighter heatsink and a handful of other tweaks. An earlier teardown and analysis of the revised PS5 made headlines because it suggested that the new PS5 ran warmer than the old one, based on the temperature of the air being exhausted from the console. This does make some intuitive sense if you assume that a smaller heatsink will automatically be worse at dissipating heat. But more detailed and precise testing from the YouTubers at Hardware Busters International backs up our skepticism of that claim, showing that the PS5’s exhaust air is warmer because the new cooling system is doing a better job of removing heat from the console, as cooling systems are meant to do.
The Hardware Busters testing measured the temperature of the APU, memory, voltage regulator modules (VRMs), and exhaust air while Devil May Cry 5 was running on both PS5 models. The exhaust air is indeed a few degrees warmer in the new PS5 than the old one, but on average, the new PS5’s APU ran about 11°C cooler, dropping from about 51°C to 40°C.
The memory and VRM temperatures in the new PS5 rise a bit—the memory temperature goes up by around 7°C and the VRM temperature goes up by around 1.3°C—but neither increase should have a huge impact on the console’s reliability or longevity. The much larger drop in APU temperature is worth the tradeoff.
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