At the start of the console generation, Sony posted an official teardown video for the PS5. This is later followed by one for the PS VR2. More recently, the company has posted one for the PS5 Pro on its official PlayStation blog. Though this time, it doesn’t come in video form, so some of the magic is lost this time around.
That being said, the post does still come with information on some of the design choices for the PS5 Pro, and it’s really more to do with cooling than anything else. Starting from the top, the three fin-like blades are described as “new airflow paths” to “enhance airflow while also acting as a design element”. It also “prevents some of the fan noise from escaping the console towards the front direction”. So if you think your console is quieter than the base model, it may simply be an engineering trick.
As an extension of the improved cooling, PS5 Pro Mechanical Design Lead Shinya Tsuchida says that the exhaust vent surface is larger compared to other PS5 models. Though to be fair, it’s only slightly larger than the original design. On the other hand, the more substantial difference is with the cooling fan, which is noticeably larger than the one in the Slim model, which in turn is a lot more similar in size to the base model. Tsuchida says that while there are the same number of blades, the Pro model’s fans has smaller blades in between each large blade for quieter air flow.
Going deeper, we see that the PS5 Pro has a larger motherboard to fit the additional circuits to achieve its increased performance. Part of this is the addition of a DDR5 RAM chip to handle the “low-speed processing” of the OS, letting the existing eight GDDR6 chips – which got their own speed upgrade – to handle game rendering. The larger motherboard also leads to minor changes to where the ports go relative to the console as a whole.
As an aside, the CMOS battery in the PS5 Pro is also a lot easier to replace compared to the earlier models, though it’s a surprise it wasn’t the case from the start of the console generation. After all, the PS4 had an issue – which was later patched – that made games unplayable once the battery had depleted its charge, and the console couldn’t connect to the PSN servers.
(Source: PlayStation)
