Is Sony’s New PS5 Model Actually A Downgrade From The Original?

There’s a new PlayStation 5 in town. Sony released the new version of the hit video game console without any fanfare.

Indeed, the new model has no performance improvements, does not increase storage and will not impact your day-to-day gaming in any way.

But it might have a small downgrade in order to save Sony production costs and make more PS5 units available in the coming months. More availability is certainly good news, but what about this downgrade?

YouTuber Austin Evans purchased one of these new PlayStation 5 models in order to see why it weighed 0.6 lbs less than the original. After breaking down both models, Evans discovered that the new model had a smaller, totally redesigned heatsink.

Evans tested the temperature of both units prior to breaking them down and found that the new model was running hotter than the old model, concluding that the heatsink was a downgrade implemented for cost-savings purposes at the expense of quality.

There’s just one problem with this conclusion: Evans only measured the temperature of the exhaust on both units. This is where the hot air is expelled from the system, rather than the system itself. With only that measurement all we can conclude is that the air coming out of the machine is hotter—not how hot the unit itself is running.

On the one hand, this could very well mean that the new PS5 runs hotter. On the other hand, it could mean that the new heatsink is simply more efficient at expelling heat from the system and that it’s actually an improvement on the older design. We’d need to test the temperature of internal components—the system-on-a-chip (SoC), the motherboard, the RAM and the SSD storage—in order to actually determine how hot each system is running.

Regardless, the 5° Celsius increase in exhaust temperature is hardly worrisome. The Xbox Series X runs hotter still. Unless you keep your console inside an enclosed space—like the poorly conceived entertainment center cabinets some people own—this won’t make any real-world difference to your gaming experience.

Hopefully we discover more about the new PS5’s internal temps soon. Sony has not commented on the matter.

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