Sony has posted a seven-minute video detailing a teardown of the PS5, giving us our first look inside the console.
Our host is Yasuhiro Ootori, Sony's VP, Mechanical Design Department, Hardware Design Division.
Ootori speaks Japanese throughout, but if your Japanese is a little rusty, you can turn on the closed captions to get the full lowdown.
He starts by talking through the ports, including one USB-C and three USB-A, LAN, HDMI and power. After a quick look at the vents, it's time to delve inside.
You'll need to loosen a screw to remove the base, but the side panels pop off by hand. Once inside, we get a look at the cooling fan, which draws in air from both sides. Below the fan are two dust catcher holes – the dust that gathers here can be vacuumed out.
Then the real techy stuff begins. For expansion, it has the M.2 interface with PCIe 4.0 support. Once the fan is removed, Ootori gives us its dimensions: 120 x 45mm. And with the casing having come off, we get a look at the Ultra HD Blu-ray drive. This is "completely covered with a sheet metal case and mounted with two layers of insulators to reduce drive noise and vibration when the discs spin".
He then talks us through the chips. The CPU is an x86-64 AMD Ryzen Zen 2 with eight cores, 16 threads, and runs up to 3.5GHz. The GPU – an AMD Radeon RDNA-2-based graphics engine – is driven at up to 2.23GHz and delivers 10.3 TFLOPs. In terms of memory, there's 8 GDDR6 with a maximum bandwidth of 448GB/s.
We also get a look at the 825GB SSD storage – which is about the size of an SD card – which, along with the custom SSD controller, delivers read speeds as fast as 5.5GB/s at raw data transfer rates. This should deliver on Sony's promise to virtually eliminate game load times.
The SoC (system on a chip) is a small die running at a very high clock rate, Ootori adds, leading to a very high thermal density in the silicon die. To counteract this, Sony had to beef up the thermal conductor to prevent overheating. It uses liquid metal – something that took Sony over two years to perfect.
The heatsink itself looks a bit like a blaster from a sci-fi film. Like the PS3 and PS4's, it uses a heat pipe, but the new shape and airflow have given it a performance comparable to a vapour chamber.
After a brief look at the 350W power supply unit, Ootori is done, and looks over all the parts laid out before him like a proud dad. The good news: you won't have to assemble it all yourself.
The PS5 is available to pre-order now – check our PS5 pre-orders page for the latest details on where to get one.
It'll go on sale on 12th November in certain territories, and 19th November in the rest of the world. The PS5 Digital Edition price is £360 (€400, $400, AU$599) and the full-fat PS5 with disc drive (as seen in this video) will cost £450 (€500, $500, AU$750). The consoles will compete with Microsoft's Xbox Series X and S for the next-gen gaming crown.
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