Earlier this week Sony decided to reveal one of the PS4’s biggest secrets and show off what very few, other than those at Sony, have ever seen; everything inside the console.
With the PS4 launch now a matter of days away, we’ve no doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of gamers just like us who are out there scouring the web, picking up new bits of information in anticipation of a new console showing up on the doorstep. This week Yasuhiro Ootori of Sony has blessed us with a peek inside the PS4, tearing the console apart in a careful and constructive manner to reveal what’s inside.
It took Ootori just over an hour and a half to fully take apart the console, cautiously removing each part and setting it down so as to reveal a jigsaw puzzle of high-tech parts on the table. You might have expected the insides of this next-gen games console to be ultra-futuristic and perplexing in design, but Sony has kept things rather simple – repairability looks to be high, so should the PS4 pick up any common traits such as – god forbid – a yellow light of death, we may be able to repair it ourselves with a little help from our friend the internet.
The parts resemble a personal desktop computer of sorts, with a large green motherboard being the key part, home to an x86 processor, 8GB of GDDR5 memory and a dedicated graphics chip. There’s also a 2.5-inch 500GB laptop-type hard drive which seems easily removable and upgradeable, so a 1TB boost could easily be on the cards for gamers.
Despite the upgraded hardware and smaller casing compared to the PS3, Sony doesn’t seem to have gone overboard with cooling. We can only spot one large central fan and a good sized heatsink, though pretty much everything has a hole or series of vents in it, all of which will help any hot air get pushed out through the ventilated rear panel via two heat pipes.
One final point of interest is the power supply. It’s actually inside the console – something which blew our tiny minds, as the PS4 is rather small – so you’re not bothered by a clunky brick trailing behind your console or across your floor, a very nice touch indeed.
The Sony PS4 launches on November 15th in North America and November 29th in the UK and Europe.