Of course, the first thing we want to comment on is that the work behind the end result of this water-cooled PS5 is monumental, and Nate himself explains to us in the video everything they had to do to create it : from the ground-up design to the exterior design that, personally, we find as impressive as it is uncomfortable to use (aesthetically it’s amazing, but imagine having that on the living room furniture).
The most impressive liquid-cooled PS5
As we said, during the video the YouTuber tells us about the manufacturing process of this unique PS5. It starts from the design, for which they had to 3D model the console PCB to measure with micrometric precision the layout of all its components and thus be able to literally make a custom water block, to how they finally created its external casing.
We recommend watching it in full because, indeed, it has a lot of merit, and we don’t even want to think about the money they had to invest (several thousand dollars, of course).
The result is a modernist industrial-looking PS5, with built-in lighting and everything, that’s much larger and heavier than Sony’s original PS5 (and look, the original model is already big and heavy) but according to the YouTuber, it’s is much quieter, and this is a big improvement because it must be recognized that the original model from the Japanese firm is quite noisy when “pushed” it.
And why wasn’t it worth it in the end?
As Nate explains to us in the video, and this is something we know because it also applies to PC processors and graphics cards, the PS5 has a “thermal acceleration” system, so that when the console is running at a good temperature, your APU speeds up to deliver better performance, which results in a higher FPS level or, in games that have capped FPS, at least the FPS drops are smaller.
In other words, it is a similar process to Thermal Throttling, but instead of reducing performance due to high temperature, it increases performance when the temperature is right and allows it.
However, and despite the fact that, as they explain in the video, it is difficult to measure performance on a video game console, they have determined that the performance improvement is only around 5%, even if they don’t know if the game applies. dynamic resolution scaling or not. What they are saying is that the console is logically much quieter.
Because performance hasn’t been much improved? The answer, in our opinion, is quite simple: we’ve often told you that games run so well on the limited hardware that consoles have because they have been specifically optimized for it. In other words, when a developer creates a video game for PS5, they do so with their specific materialand that includes your thermal performance; To this we must add the limitations of the hardware itself, which no matter how much they have this thermal acceleration system, it is not that the PS5 APU will increase its operating speed without limit, no matter at how liquid cooling makes it work, to say something, at 20ºC cooler than with the original cooling system, but it goes up “a little” to improve performance, and here is that 5% improvement that Nate comments in the video.
So, and as we’ve said at some point in the past, this is both the good and bad side of consoles… the good thing is that since the games are specifically optimized for their hardware, they work well even though this hardware is quite limited and obviously inferior to that of a gaming PC for example, but the bad side is that you can hardly improve on what Sony’s game development teams and engineers have done simply changing the cooling system, without touching the hardware is what ultimately determines performance.
