All of these changes add another weight reduction, but no obvious changes to the PS5’s exterior. The real big change is the updated motherboard on the PS5. It’s shrunk by about two inches, and the cooling for the PS5 is slightly different thanks to an additional heatpipe on the back and a smaller heatsink.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a redesigned cooling solution on the PS5. Sony shipped a revised model last year with a smaller heatsink. The new motherboard and heatsink on this PS5 2022 now weigh around 2.5kg according to Evans, which is a kilo lighter than the original design.
Sony has also moved a lot of components with this new motherboard design and it means that the CMOS battery is now completely hidden under the heatsink. It was exposed in the past, making it easy to disable, but Evans claims you’ll now have to completely disassemble a PS5 to replace the CMOS battery.
The smallest heatsink inside the new PS5 model (1200). Image: Austin Evans (YouTube)
The SSD housing has also been changed in this new PS5 mode. It no longer has a full length PCB, but has exposed metal. It’s not immediately clear why Sony changed this particular part of the PS5’s design, but Evans speculates that it could help improve heat dissipation.
All of these changes might add some real-world benefits for the PS5. Evans claims that this new PS5 model draws about 20-30 watts less during gameplay while still providing about the same amount of noise and heat.
“Sony shrunk almost everything, including the motherboard and internal packaging, to make it lighter and almost certainly cheaper (for it),” Evans says on Twitter. The new PS5 model comes just as Sony has increased PS5 prices outside the US. Sony is raising its PS5 prices in the UK, Europe, Japan, China, Australia, Mexico and Canada. Prices are up 10 percent in Europe, 21 percent in Japan and around 6 percent in the UK.
