> with rear exhaust temperatures around 3 to 5 degrees higher
Is that C or F? I'm going to assume Fahrenheit. Also, is that bad? In other words, did they measure the rest of the unit to see if it was hotter or cooler? Maybe they've directed more heat to the exhaust. Which is the whole point, after all.
In terms of if it's bad? shrug. With a smaller heat sink, the chips are almost certainly going to be hotter (dunno how much.. at least 3-5 degrees, maybe up to 10?).
Does that matter? Tech youtubers love to emphasize cooling - which is fair, I think it's important, but I also think it's overdone.
From the end-user standpoint, the question is does this meaningfully increase the rate that their unit thermal throttles (the PS5 uses boost just like modern laptops/PCs... the xbox and ps4 did not) in like... 95 (or whatever threshold) percentile shitty (so like stuffed in a cabinet with air flow being impinged) environments.
Because of boost variability, it's gonna be kinda annoying to do true side by side performance comparisons. At the very least, you'd need to swap cooling solutions on the same silicon. No idea how feasible that is with the PS5 design.
I think for the end user the primary concern is not performance, but the potential fan noise.
If the performance goes up or down, end users might not even notice, but if the fan is constantly kicking in and being too loud too often, more people will be concerned.
Agreed, this would be the main concern, since it's one the things people hated about the PS4 and PS4 Pro (being really loud). I don't think Sony would want a regression there either.
That's fair. I think the fan noise consideration is interesting because it's possible (depending on fan and load characteristics) to run the fan more (as in % duty on at "high" speed) and not meaningfully effect the perception enjoyment since it's often the fan noise changing (not the fan noise itself... though obviously this depends on how obnoxious the fan noise) that is annoying, not the fan noise itself.
I don't own any of these consoles, so I can't really say first hand, but for my Xbox One (the og one), I just know that I notice when the fans kick in... and then I just get absorbed into the game (and game noise).
In the brief testing Austin Evans did in his YouTube video comparing the two, the new model was actually a touch quieter and a few degrees warmer. Of course that may not hold in all scenarios but it's something to note.
The final step missing is checking the framerates - those systems use dynamic clocks and can potentially throttle. Sony claims "PS5 consoles process the same workloads with the same performance level in any environment, no matter what the ambient temperature may be", but you never know until you test, like PS3 "random" number generator.
Almost all laptop performance is constrained by heat, heat makes user's palm hot, and its fan must be near the user. So it's fair to focus on heat for laptop.
But gaming console is designed to not to thermal throttled and no boost (or little boost), and console is some feet away from user, so the heat importance is different.
It's centigrade. The video does all measurements in metric (weight in grams too). Anyway it's pretty common for consumer electronics people to talk in centigrade.
> Anyway it's pretty common for consumer electronics people to talk in centigrade
It's common for people to talk in centigrade. Fahrenheit is only used in the US, some dependencies and similar (like Liberia), so the vast majority of people on Earth talk in C.
People more experienced say measuring exhaust temperature is not enough to determine if it's cooling better or worse, measurements need to be made internally.
Thanks for that, I was thinking down that route. I just had a laptop where chip and heatsink had parted. The air coming out was not that hot, but you could have fried an egg on the nearby part of the case.
In theory it could be good thing for more heat to come out of the back with the same SoC - it means more heat is being transferred to the air... As long as the running thermals look the same this would be an improvement.
A reason for this could be better air modelling, increased surface area of the heat sink or longer contact time with the heat sink before being fanned out.
It's worth waiting for some proper testing before deciding if it is better or not.
Doesn't this depend significantly on ambient temperature? Running the console in the summer without AC could make the components run at yet-higher temperature, right?
I'm not familiar with how quickly CPU (and similar components) deteriorate under much higher temperature.
Yes, higher exhaust temperature is not a direct indicator. For the same airflow, higher exhaust temperature suggests more energy being carried away, which can reduce chip temp, all else being the same. If the airflow was reduced, but the heat pipe improved, it could still be that chip temp stayed the same.
Is that C or F? I'm going to assume Fahrenheit. Also, is that bad? In other words, did they measure the rest of the unit to see if it was hotter or cooler? Maybe they've directed more heat to the exhaust. Which is the whole point, after all.
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