Long-Awaited PS5 Teardown Confirms Removable Flaps, Liquid Metal, SSD Expansion Slot and More

At long last, we finally have the PS5 teardown video with us. It’s something that many fans (and potential customers) of Sony’s next-gen console have been clamouring for. It’s a little surprising that Sony dropped this video way earlier than expected, as the PS4 Pro teardown happened after the launch of that console.

PlayStation 5 has the most unique design in the history of PlayStation consoles, and the PS5 teardown video helps explain some of the design choices that went into its making. A brief explanation of certain parts can be found in the PS blog post, but it’s the video that has us excited.

First off the front and rear ports shown off which include:

• 1 USB Type-A port (Front)
• 1 USB Type-C Port (Front)
• 2 USB Type-A ports (SuperSpeed USB 10GBps) (Rear)
• 1 LAN port (Rear)
• 1 HDMI 2.1 Port (Rear)
• AC In connector (Rear)

You can remove the base plate with a screwdriver, and the plate itself has a compartment to hide the screw. After that, you can attach the base plate to the console’s rear in order to place it horizontally.

Moving on, it’s now finally confirmed that the PS5’s white panels on the sides are totally removable. This can potentially lead into various 3rd party custom panels that may be available for sale after the console launches.

Removing the side panels reveals the cooling fan and 2 vents through which dust can be cleared. Moving further, the M.2 NVMe SSD storage expansion slot is shown, which is the standard M.2 expansion you’ll find in many PC motherboards.

After this, the UHD Blue-ray drive is shown which adds most of the bulk found in the PS5 Standard edition. You can see clearly just how much space can be shaved off by its removal, which is what led to the PS5 Digital Edition’s more uniform look.

The inclusion of WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 is confirmed, which will hopefully lead to faster, and more consistent, network connectivity. After this, we get to the meat of the console – the AMD Zen 2 CPU, RDNA 2 GPU, and of course, the PS5’s blazing fast SSD & its custom controller.

Now, of course, we didn’t need a PS5 teardown to know about its CPU and GPU. The Zen 2 CPU in the console is basically an underclocked AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, but AMD is yet to reveal desktop graphics cards powered by the RDNA 2 architecture. It’s also a little surprising to see liquid metal being used as a thermal solution for the die, although the high clock speeds of that GPU were asking for it.

With the console teardown now behind us, we only have the UI and more details on backwards compatibility to look forward to. This is one department where the Xbox Series marketing has really nailed. We now have a good idea of what to expect in terms of new UI features (Quick Resume) and backwards compatibility in Microsoft’s console.

However, Sony still hasn’t revealed much about those things, even keeping them secret from the Japanese Youtubers who recently got a hands-on experience with it. One would assume that with its faster SSD, a quick-resume like feature is bound to be present on Sony’s console. Well, it looks like we’ll get the first look at that soon enough.

The PlayStation 5 releases on November 12 for select markets, and November 19th for the rest of the world (barring India it seems, according to The Mako Reactor). We’ll keep you updated as more PS5 news drops, as the marketing for the next-gen console is bound to ramp up leading to launch.