There’s little I enjoy more than a console teardown – watching a mainstream piece of consumer electronics dismantled to its core, revealing… well, usually something a lot simpler than you might expect. We’ve seen people taking apart the PlayStation 5 Pro in the past, but last week, Sony finally revealed its own teardown, sharing a wealth of wonderful incidental detail that gives us some remarkable insights into just how much engineering effort goes into a modern console.
From a personal perspective, the biggest surprise I had on receiving my own PS5 Pro last November was how small it was. We’d heard about the leaked specs, we were expecting a very large processor and with reduced graphics clock speeds compared to RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 graphics cards, we’d expected a 6nm chip backed by a substantial cooling assembly. The expectation was for a unit on par volume-wise with the original PlayStation 5 – but we were wrong.
Sony’s teardown arrived in the same week that a PS5 Pro mainboard arrived at my place (yes it’s strange, but I do collect console motherboards – principally for photography purposes when it comes to video content). Opening the package I was struck by a board that’s not really that much larger than the PS5 Slim equivalent. The relatively small increase in board size is matched by a surprisingly slight delta in the size of the main processor. The new Pro’s circa 279mm2 chip isn’t that much larger than the Slim’s 260mm2, as close as we are going to get to confirmation that Sony is using a more modern 4nm process technology, as used on the latest consumer graphics cards.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:01 News 1: Days Gone Remastered tested!0:15:33 News 2: Ghost of Yōtei release date trailer drops0:28:59 News 3: Switch 2 Edition upgrades vary in price0:41:21 News 4: Game Key Cards dominate early Switch 2 software0:52:43 News 5: Clarifying Switch 2 game resolutions1:07:55 News 6: Sony publishes PS5 Pro teardown1:17:04 Supporter Q1: How do you manage personnel on DF Direct?1:21:56 Supporter Q2: Will Elder Scrolls 6 use Unreal Engine for rendering?1:27:04 Supporter Q3: What’s with the poor FMV quality in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33?1:37:19 Supporter Q4: Is PS5 VRR stutter proof that most gamers don’t care about stutter?1:44:47 Supporter Q5: Can you raise awareness of the current Game Pass driver issues on PC?
Taking a look at that tiny board also brings back into focus just how efficient the design is. When PS5 Pro was announced, there seemed to be a rush of gamers and journalists looking to build more powerful PCs for the same approximate cost. I didn’t see any convincing evidence that it could be done then and I don’t now – unless you want to add in a few years’ worth of PlayStation Plus subscriptions. CPU, GPU and a range of other logic are contained on that single processor. Memory for all system functions is shared across eight main GDDR6 modules, with a ninth 2GB DDR5 added on to handle slower system functions, leaving more of the faster RAM for games. A new WiFi module is added, while the built-in SSD looks much the same as it does on PS5 Slim, just with double-capacity modules.