The "new" PS5 actually has better cooling!

[Katarok]

Summary

 

After Austin Evan's famous video about the new PS5 revision, the CFI-1116A model, it turned out that it had a smaller heatsink that weighted ~300 grams less. A debate started on the whether Sony *cheapened out* on cooling performance or not. Ares, a Greek electrical engineer who has his own small tech channel called "Hardware Busters" decided to do a deep test into it and find out the truth. As it turns out not only the new heatsink offers good cooling it even offers 11 decrees lower in the SoC.

However even with that cooling difference, it doesn't really matter since the both models get the same power of the wall and have the same SoC thus get the same performance.

Quotes (translated from Greek by yours truly)

Quote

Despite what has been said lately, in our measurements the new PS5 seems to be somewhat better than the original model, at least the model we had at our disposal. Taking into account that the exhaust temperature on the new PS5 is higher than the "old", it means that the cooling system does a better job.

My thoughts

Well, Sony engineers are actually good at their job. Sadly Ares isn't an expert when it comes to heatsinks so he can only observe and document the results. I hope that someone who is, eventually comes around to answer the new question in my mind. "Why is the smaller heatsink better?"

 

Sources
Link to Austin Evan's video:

Link to Ares' written news article, warning it is in Greek: https://www.insomnia.gr/review/video-games/sony-playstation-5-cfi-1116a-review/ But the Temperature and Voltage readings as well the Thermal Camera pictures are there.
Usually he also writes for some popular English tech news sites, but if he has in this scenario I wasn't able to to find it. Anyway for those that want to understand his commentary and input on the situation here is the
Link to the youtube video on their English channel "Hardware Busters Internationals", It is basically the news article but in an English video form.

 

[jaslion]

I think it has more to do with optimization of the cooler to better follow the path of airflow here rather than anything else. The removal of a piece of the heatsink was most likely done to remove restrictions and because the air would be hot anyway thus the cooling potential of the other parts of the heatsink would be lowered as the difference in temperature would be lower.

[ki8aras]

imo they were blindsided by the launch of the series x/s so they threw a console together as fast as they could in order to meet a certain time frame, so now theyre going back and optimizing that design

[SorryBella]

33 minutes ago, Katarok said:

Well, Sony engineers are actually good at their job. Sadly Ares isn't an expert when it comes to heatsinks so he can only observe and document the results. I hope that someone who is, eventually comes around to answer the new question in my mind. "Why is the smaller heatsink better?"

Law of Diminishing Returns is daddy in heatsink design.

[mariushm]

Well I can tell you it's lighter because there's less COPPER in the heatsink, and there's less aluminum fins. 

They're countering that by changing the fan blade, the fan has longer blades, which to me feels like  optimizing for more air pressure, and more air gets actually pushed through the fins. 

 

To me an uneducated guess would be that the engineers were probably overly concerned about dust blocking the heatsink and causing hardware failures so they oversized the heatsink initially, and now they realized it's not an issue so they're reducing the heatsink a bit. 

 

It could also be they're preparing for a new batch of chipsets or ps5 chips made at 6nm instead of 7nm, or the "refined" 7nm process from tsmc, which would cause a tiny reduction in heat produced by the chips .. I doubt it could be this, but wouldn't be impossible.

 

(I may be wrong about the fan blade optimization but that's what seems logical to me). 

 

[Spindel]

Quote

After Austin Evan's famous video about the new PS5 revision, the CFI-1116A model, it turned out that it had a smaller heatsink that weighted ~300 grams less. A debate started on the whether Sony *cheapened out* on cooling

People are so ill-informed. 

 

Weight of a heat sink tells us nothing of it's cooling capacity other than it takes longer for it to reach equilibrium temperature because of the increased thermal mass. 

[ravenshrike]

3 hours ago, Katarok said:

However even with that cooling difference, it doesn't really matter since the both models get the same power of the wall and have the same SoC thus get the same performance.

This is actually untrue. Better cooling will allow different boost behavior in either the GPU or CPU portion of the SoC. even if the maximum power envelope remains unchanged as the chips' max clocks are temp dependent. Probably not going to be that much of an issue in practice, but it will effect performance on the margins.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

3 hours ago, ki8aras said:

imo they were blindsided by the launch of the series x/s so they threw a console together as fast as they could in order to meet a certain time frame, so now theyre going back and optimizing that design

This doesn't really jive with PlayStation history.  The PlayStation's have always been constantly revised beyond the major revisions that consumers see such as 'Fat' and 'Slim' models.  The PS1 had around 12 major motherboard revisions.  The PS2 has over 20.  The PS3 has 20 or so.  While the PS4 had less, the basic PS4 had about 6 revisions and the PS4 Pro had 2-3.

Sony going back and optimizing the design is not a result of 'rushed development' it's literally what they've always done with their hardware for the last 26 years.

[Spindel]

9 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

This is actually untrue. Better cooling will allow different boost behavior in either the GPU or CPU portion of the SoC. even if the maximum power envelope remains unchanged as the chips' max clocks are temp dependent. Probably not going to be that much of an issue in practice, but it will effect performance on the margins.

Only if you reach the temperature threshold.

 

If it is the case with both heat sinks in the PS5 that you never reach the temperature threshold there shouldn't be any difference in performance. 

[ravenshrike]

17 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Only if you reach the temperature threshold.

 

Temp threshold for AMD CPUs/GPUs is a soft threshold, not a hard one. 

[porina]

57 minutes ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Sony going back and optimizing the design is not a result of 'rushed development' it's literally what they've always done with their hardware for the last 26 years.

Not limited to Sony. Many products will not be the best they can be to get it out within a certain timeframe. This is fine as long as it does what it is supposed to. After launch, they can then refine it where it is worth doing so, usually motivated by cost savings, or if required for other reasons e.g. changing part availability.

[Brooksie359]

2 hours ago, Spindel said:

Only if you reach the temperature threshold.

 

If it is the case with both heat sinks in the PS5 that you never reach the temperature threshold there shouldn't be any difference in performance. 

It totally depends on how the boost is setup. Most modern gpus have the boost being heavily tied to temperature. I mean if gpus didn't start down clocking before hitting a critical temperature threshold then that would be bad. I would imagine that the ps5 has something similar as it would likely be the easiest way to avoid having thermal shutdowns and other issues related to improper temperature control. Either that or they have the gpu at a fixed boost and created an overengineered cooling system to make sure that even at fringe cases the likelihood of thermal shutdown is small. 

[Katarok]

3 hours ago, ravenshrike said:

This is actually untrue. Better cooling will allow different boost behavior in either the GPU or CPU portion of the SoC. even if the maximum power envelope remains unchanged as the chips' max clocks are temp dependent. Probably not going to be that much of an issue in practice, but it will effect performance on the margins.

How much energy something draws is directly tied to temperature. Since that is where the heat comes from. When a system detects that it is overheating it will reduce the amount of energy it draws to lower the heat and thus the temperature. If it doesn't it will burn itself to death.

That is what drops clocks and causes the so called "Thermal Throttling". The "boost" is simply the cooling having more overhead and thus allowing more energy to enter the system, increasing the clocks.

You can detect all these things simply by examining how much energy it draws of the wall. Obviously different architectures manage electricity differently, but the PS5 versions all have the same SoC. Thus we can tell by just looking at the numbers that the performance on both models is exactly the same.

[Dabombinable]

I already knew that the updated model would have better cooling, with the decreased exhaust temperature..

[Quackers101]

saw some of the most recent steve/GN's video.

a bit mixed in temps, but overall better performance in temps for the cooling.

but still overall concerns. still having a set of heating issues. also airflow differences it can have between the metal and fan.

 

also any change in software/firmware?

 

[Commodus]

On 9/9/2021 at 5:41 AM, ki8aras said:

imo they were blindsided by the launch of the series x/s so they threw a console together as fast as they could in order to meet a certain time frame, so now theyre going back and optimizing that design

To add to what Cereal said: that's not how console design works.

 

It takes years to get a console ready: basic engineering, securing custom components, establishing a developer framework, testing... you don't just wait for your competitor to do something and then create an entire platform in a knee-jerk reaction. It's not like Sony was going to ride the PS4's coattails forever.

 

I'm reminded of how people parroted the myth that Apple's iPhone was a copy of the LG Prada announced a few months earlier. As if Apple had no plans for a phone until it saw the Prada, and magically created an entire hardware architecture and operating system in less time than Microsoft takes to patch some Windows bugs. In both cases, people were more than a little optimistic.