If you have a PS4 or have ever played one, you have probably noticed that its cooling system is really, really loud. Even if you aren’t playing a very graphics-intensive game, your PS4 may suddenly sound like its preparing to launch itself into space. While this is obviously preferable to your graphics card and CPU melting down, it can be a bit annoying. With the heightened number of hours people are putting into gaming at the moment, many people have become irritated with this, and memes about the loud fan are going viral on twitter.
Earlier this year, PS5 architect Mark Cerny admitted that in the past Sony hadn’t done the best job with quiet cooling, but he explained that the PS5 should be much quieter due to new technology. The internet may have dug up this new technology in a patent by Sony from 2018, and Reddit user nemesis_scale has rendered the patent in 3D to see what it could look like.
It is important to note that these patents do not state that they are for the PS5 specifically, but the use of a big heatsink would make sense in order to diffuse the heat more efficiently, and require the fan itself to do less work. This is what the Xbox Series X is using as well, in combination with a unique stacked design and a specially designed fan, in order to keep cooling efficient and quiet.
Due to Covid-19, Sony has had to alter their plans for announcing hardware for their new console, and will likely be releasing it in limited quantity initially. Because of this, we haven’t seen what the PS5 itself will look like, but hopefully, Sony goes for a design more focused on performance like that of the Xbox Series X or One S/One X which all have massive amounts of ventilation, rather than that of the Ps4 which seemingly needs a jet engine to keep it cool.