Playstation 5: Hobbyist builds ultra-flat and water-cooled console – News

On the Youtube channel DIY perks Has Matthew Perks shown a Playstation 5 which is only 20mm high. The video (included under this news) shows the enormously complex conversion to build a heavily modified Playstation 5 with water cooling, so that the console on the lowboard is only 20 mm high.

In the first step, the entire Playstation 5 was disassembled. So first the complete housing and the very large power supply were removed. Since the mainboard is about 60 mm high together with the heatsink, the heatsink had to be removed from the mainboard as well. Commercially available water blocks for cooling computer CPUs, including all connections for the hoses or pipes, are significantly too high, so only the copper cooling block was removed from a CPU cooler. Several copper sheets were then cut to fit the Playstation mainboard and then soldered together in an oven.

When assembling the custom cooling block for the Playstation 5, liquid metal, encased in a sealing compound, was again applied to the SoC (system-on-a-chip). Voltage converters and flash memory were coated with heat-conducting paste and on the opposite side of the cooling block, copper strips of appropriate thickness were attached with heat-conducting adhesive. Due to the greater need for heat dissipation of the VRMs, they need a heat pipe, as is also used in the original cooling concept of the Playstation.

The power pack could not be integrated into this flat case, so an external solution had to be used. Together with the power cable, the supply and discharge lines for the water cooling leave the case on the back. The water pump, the fan and the associated radiator for heat transfer to the ambient air and the external power supply are located behind the lowboard on the wall.

According to DIY Perks, the conversion took a few months and resulted in a “Playstation 5 Slim” that was able to reduce the temperature of the SoC by around 10K, the RAM by 42K and the VRMs by 27K compared to the original Playstation 5 .