Sony says PS5’s large cooling fan will be optimised through online updates

The large cooling fan in PlayStation 5 will be optimised through online updates, Sony has said.

Measuring 120mm in diameter and 45mm thick, the cooling fan was revealed in an official PS5 teardown video earlier this month.

In an interview with 4Gamer (via Resetera), Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Yasuhiro Otori said the company plans to optimise the fan’s performance through firmware updates based on data gathered from individual games.

PS5 uses a temperature sensor on its accelerated processing unit (APU) and three more sensors on its main board to regulate fan speed.

“Various games will be released in the future, and data on the APU’s behavior in each game will be collected,” Otori said. “We have a plan to optimize the fan control based on this data.”

In a separate interview, Otori Yasuhiro, the head of PS5’s mechanical and thermal design team, said the large fan was required to cool both sides of PS5’s main board equally.

The engineer said the console could have been smaller in size if Sony had opted to install two smaller cooling fans instead – one for each side of the machine.

However, controlling multiple fans would be more difficult than the current design and would also have increased the manufacturing cost of the hardware.

Recent hands-on previews in Japan reserved particular praise for PS5’s cooling system and expressed surprise at how quietly the console operates compared to PS4.

According to a Bloomberg report earlier this year, Sony implemented an “unusually expensive” cooling system in PS5.

The PlayStation 5 release date is November 12 in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea. The rest of the world will get the console a week later on November 19.

PS5 will be priced at $500/€500/£450 for the standard edition and $400/€400/£360 for the Digital Edition, with the only difference between them being the former’s inclusion of a disc drive.

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