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Linus Tech Tips managed to get his hands on a PS5 Slim recently. Doing the thing that none of use likely brave enough to do, he ripped it to pieces with power tools and screw-drivers. Casually (right beside his kitchen sink) disassembling it, he found some alarming specs related to power draw and efficiency.
“One really weird thing we noticed, if you go back to the home screen without closing your game, you’re still seeing power draw around 160W which is way more than the 50W we were seeing before. This means the game is far less suspended than we would have expected. So make sure to properly close your games when you’re done, or you could see it on your power bill.”
This was the only discrepancy with power draw with the console – likely due to the fact that the 6nm Oberon Plus chip used in the PS5 Slim is the same as the one used in the latest PS5 model. This makes a lot of sense, though. The PS5 Slim isn’t necessarily a hardware upgrade, but a form-factor upgrade.
It’s more than likely that the issues with the PS5 Slim’s power draw being unnecessarily high while games are suspended is a software optimisation one. It’s possible that this could be rectified at some point, though until then we’d advise anyone looking to pre-order a PS5 Slim to consider this.
Alongside that, when tearing open the PS5 Slim to have a peek at its chip, Linus noted that there’s “not a lot of thermal compound, they’ve just got little dots on each of the DRAM packages and the NAND packages too.” Linus later jested that “I could give them some pointers” on the design of their hardware.
That said, Linus also said that he was in shock in response to the PS5 Slim. While PlayStation Slim models generally are followed by a shrink to node-size, the PS5 Slim hasn’t. “I like it,” he finishes.
The PS5 Slim hasn’t released yet, though it seems likely that it’s going to arrive alongside Modern Warfare 3. We’re going to be keeping an eye out for the latest updates on the next PlayStation model, so make sure to check back in with us periodically. In the meantime, check out our comparison of the PS5 Slim vs Xbox Series X.
Cover image credited to Linus Media Group.
