Is that C or F? I'm going to assume Fahrenheit. Also, is that bad? In other words, did they measure the rest of the unit to see if it was hotter or cooler? Maybe they've directed more heat to the exhaust. Which is the whole point, after all.
In terms of if it's bad? shrug. With a smaller heat sink, the chips are almost certainly going to be hotter (dunno how much.. at least 3-5 degrees, maybe up to 10?).
Does that matter? Tech youtubers love to emphasize cooling - which is fair, I think it's important, but I also think it's overdone.
From the end-user standpoint, the question is does this meaningfully increase the rate that their unit thermal throttles (the PS5 uses boost just like modern laptops/PCs... the xbox and ps4 did not) in like... 95 (or whatever threshold) percentile shitty (so like stuffed in a cabinet with air flow being impinged) environments.
Because of boost variability, it's gonna be kinda annoying to do true side by side performance comparisons. At the very least, you'd need to swap cooling solutions on the same silicon. No idea how feasible that is with the PS5 design.
If the performance goes up or down, end users might not even notice, but if the fan is constantly kicking in and being too loud too often, more people will be concerned.
It's common for people to talk in centigrade. Fahrenheit is only used in the US, some dependencies and similar (like Liberia), so the vast majority of people on Earth talk in C.
A reason for this could be better air modelling, increased surface area of the heat sink or longer contact time with the heat sink before being fanned out.
It's worth waiting for some proper testing before deciding if it is better or not.
I'm not familiar with how quickly CPU (and similar components) deteriorate under much higher temperature.
So companies develop models that tell them how long things like the SOC (main chip with CPU, etc.) will last for a given temperature and use frequency, and whether or not they've got a 1-year design on their hands, or one that will last 20 years.
The model improves as you gain experience with manufacturing, customer issues, and get more testing than you could do before launch. Making the systems too beefy can be expensive, and saving pennies really matters when you're making millions of units.
So I imagine that the folks at Sony determined they could get away with a smaller heatsink and still have an acceptable fleet failure rate, probably a year or two out from the posted warranty.
EU at this time put a deadline to the end of use for lead based solder, so the move to leadfree solder was done right before moving to mass manufacturing. The poor cooling solution on the 360 compared to its heat output didn't do the system justice. The PCB would flex as it would not be heated evenly.
After Die shrinks and manufacturing revisions, more mature lead free solder also used. The Jasper units were pretty much tanks, and the cooling solution was oversized as they were the same as before with the much hotter and power demanding lager die first gen chips.
Video Cards from the era of the launch 360 are notoriously unreliable for the same reasons. Heat cycles were a death wish, luckily for videocards they normally had a cool down period after gaming idling at a desktop. While the 360 would commonly go from 100% load term load to off.
I was talking to an old colleague of mine that was an electronics engineer, and apparently, the issue with the xbox 360 was that the heat inside the case made the solder a bit more softer than expected. This would not be an issue for a horizontally positioned xbox 360, but when placed on it's side (which a lot of people did), this caused extremely slow shifting of certain components on the motherboard towards the direction of gravity. After (for most people) a few years, certain components would shift enough to not have proper contact with the board.
I was offered the analogy of the long-standing pitch viscocity experiment - everything is technically a liquid, just to wildly different degrees.
Not sure if this is true though, it was many years ago!
Worst quote they coulda pulled. Literally sends the opposite message than the one its meant to convey.
Unless im even worse at english than i thought.
“There’s no debate” as in “it’s so obvious, there’s no one on the other side debating that it is not true”
The full quote is “I don’t think there’s any argument that this is a worse console, at least for thermals and for cooling,” says Evans. “As far as I’m concerned I’d rather have a launch PS5.”
Edit: wrote his name wrong.
All in all I think it's the worst designed console I've ever had.
The curvy top makes controllers slide off while they're charging so I had to put a drawer liner on top.
The white plastic overhang seems delicate, I have no idea how I'd ever pack the thing up without breaking it.
And when mounted horizontally, the stand falls off every time I move the console. What's wrong with built in feet?
It seems much more effective at removing heat per unit of heatsink mass than the large flat heatsink+heatpipe design of the PS5.
It's not enclosed, the back is open and separated from the wall by about 5 inches.
Which is why it's all the more alarming that they've made the cooling system in the PS5 even worse.
I will be skipping this generation. Not that it matters anyway, these consoles are impossible to find and buy, at least this will continue to be the case well into 2022.
