The Mystery Of The Lighter PS5 Has Been Solved

Now that a new model of PS5 is in the wild, one that is around 0.66 pounds lighter than the original, people are able to tear it down to find out exactly where that weight went, because Sony has not felt like sharing. And now we know why.

It turns out that, no, Sony wasn’t just scraping out plastic like those very flimsy soda bottles, and instead, almost all of that weight is due to a new, lighter, presumably lower cost heat sink. This was discovered by YouTuber Austin Evans who dismantled a digital PS5 to discover this.  

There are two main theories for why Sony has done this:

1) Cost-cutting: The idea is that Sony has now seen the PS5 perform in the wild and now understands where it can get away with cutting costs. They recently said that the PS5 disc model was now no longer selling at a loss, and presumably they want the digital one to follow. A lower cost heatsink may be part of that.

2) Parts availability: A different heatsink may allow Sony to get more of the parts they need more easily to build more PS5s to meet demand. If this was somehow a bottleneck, a new part could help relieve that (although the biggest problem is likely still chips).

This has created a weird situation, however, because consumers don’t care about how much Sony is saving or not. So in practical terms, you should theoretically have a better PS5 if you bought one at launch compared to this new model with a cheaper heatsink which should run a little bit hotter.

Now, before this gets out of hand, I’ve already seen console war memes about Sony’s newly “molten” system, but we should remember that previous tests already put the Xbox Series X as running much hotter than the original PS5, a max of 121 degrees versus 95 degrees. So a small increase isn’t going to close that gap. And that wide gap may have been the reason Sony figured they could get away with saving money on the heatsink.

But, consumers paid the same price for the system, and one has a better heatsink while the other doesn’t. That is true, and that’s why you probably haven’t heard a word from Sony about any of this, because it’s not a net positive change, except for their bottom line. And I mean, that’s what companies do, but it’s an odd scenario.

In practice, this is probably not going to be a noticeable change for most players, though this no doubt will get blown out of proportion by console war junkies to fit their narratives. But those are the facts, and we’ll see if anything else comes of this.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series, and The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.