PlayStation 5 Teardown Sees Sony Reveal Some New Console Secrets

The launch of the PlayStation 5 is coming up fast, and today, Sony is giving us an up-close look at the new console. Sony has published a teardown of the PlayStation 5 that takes inside and lets us take a peek at the hardware that makes the console run. This isn't the first time Sony has done something like this, as we also saw it teardown the PlayStation 4 Pro back when that console was the hot new thing.

Before the teardown begins, we get some details about the console as one fully-constructed machine. The PS5's dimensions clock in at 104mm wide by 390mm tall and 260mm deep, which makes it larger that a PS4. On the front of the console, there's a 10Gbps USB-C port and a USB-A port, while around the back we've got two SuperSpeed USB-A 10Gbps ports, LAN, HDMI, and an AC port, which makes for a fairly standard array of IO (no doubt there are some mourning the loss of optical audio, however).

After a quick overview of the outside, it's time to actually take the console apart. Sony begins by removing the stand and then by taking off the user-removable white panels. This is where we get to see the PS5's dust catchers, which attempt to capture dust brought in by the console's big 120mm fan. Rather than taking the entire console apart to clean out the dust it accumulates over time, Sony says that users simply need to vacuum two holes in the side of the console to remove the dust collected in the catcher.

We also get a look at an M.2 PCIe 4.0 expansion bay for additional storage, which is also user-accessible. It seems that this is as far as Sony intends users to go with their own teardowns of the consoles, as taking apart anything further will likely void warranties – indeed, there are some screws that are covered by security tape, so Sony is going to know if you do anything aside from taking off the two side panels to add storage or vacuum out the dust catcher.

The double-sided air intake fan is the first thing to be removed, followed by the casing and then the console's disc drive, which Sony notes is housed in sheet metal and has two layers of insulators to reduce noise. With the disc drive taken out, Sony can remove the shield protecting the motherboard, giving us a look at the console's 8 core/16 thread AMD Ryzen Zen 2 CPU, its AMD Radeon RDNA 2-based GPU, and its 825GB SSD (which boasts raw data transfer rates of up to 5.5GB per second).

With the motherboard removed, we get a look at the PS5's massive heatsink before Sony removes the console's 350W power supply to complete the teardown. All in all, it's an interesting teardown that's worth a watch, if only because doing this yourself with your own PS5 will void your warranty. You can check out Sony's full PS5 teardown in the video embedded above, but otherwise, look for the new console to drop on November 12th.