Back at the start of the year, we covered a project posted by a Redditor called wewillmakeitnow, who successfully “shrank” a Sony PlayStation 4 Slim (PS4 Slim) down into the size of a handheld. Well, he’s back, and this time, he’s got a PS4 Handheld V2 to show for it.
Smaller, More Compact Than The First
With PS4 Handheld V2, it’s visibly obvious that the modder has made some quality-of-life changes to the design since the first, although they’ve still retained the Xbox joystick layout, for whatever reason. In their own word, “After gaining some skills in 3D modelling, I decided to make another version that is more compact.”
Internally, wewillmakeitnow retains the same PS4 Slim components, but now, the PS4 Handheld V2 features a more modern 7-inch Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) OLED panel, as well as a bigger battery that combines six 5,000mAh cells. To put that in terms of longevity, the modder says that the console runs between 1.5 and three hours, depending on the game.
A plus point to the new design is that the batteries are also removable, reducing the system weight from 1.3kg to just around 900-ish grams. For longer gaming sessions, wewillmakeitnow says that an external 12V battery pack can be connected to it, or any other external power source.
Pilfering Fans From GPUs
Perhaps the biggest change to the overall design of the PS4 Handheld V2 is the addition of a large fan. wewillmakeitnow says that they nicked it from a graphics card, and to be precise, they nicked it from an old NVIDIA GTX 750 GPU. The modder says that the handheld console also contains a smaller 30 x 30 mm fan inside that is audibly louder than the larger fan attached to the back of the handheld, meaning that the larger fan is there primarily to cool down the rest of the components. A semi-passive cooler, if you will.
Then as now, taking on a project like this requires a certain level of techno-wizardry and know-how in the arts of electrical engineering. As another put it: it’s a tricky process, but it isn’t impossible.
The PS4 Handheld V2 aside, it has been rumoured that Sony is working on creating a handheld variant of the upcoming PlayStation 6 (PS6), with the other variant being the static and full-fledged console. The handheld is rumoured to use a custom AMD APU comprising four Zen 6c cores, two low-power Zen 6 cores, and 16 RDNA5 CUs, paired with LPDDR5X memory on a 192-bit memory bus, and a power envelope of around 15W.
(Source: Reddit)
