Sony’s PS5 Pro is widely being billed as a generational upgrade to the pandemic era PS5 and its progenitor, the PS5 Slim. According to tech reviewers, the new custom made AMD processor is on TSMC’s 5nm node and Sony’s own marketing material makes some pretty grand promises from increased computing cores (up 67%) to faster RAM (28% faster) and faster rendering (45% faster).
Despite those impressive figures, eleventeen percent of reviewers spent hours squinting at 8K TV’s placed side by side in an attempt to tell the difference between the PS5 and the PS5 Pro. That is to say, this may not be the generational upgrade many had been led to believe.
But I’ll let the tech reviewers figure that out. What we’re interested in at iFixit are improvements to the device’s repairability—and changes there are definitely more incremental than generational. We’re glad to see an easily replaceable CMOS battery, but that’s the only change from the other PS5 models worth writing home about.
Easy-Access Batteries: Burying Your Batteries Is So Last Year
The biggest repairability news in the PS5 Pro is that you can change the CMOS battery by removing a single screw. In previous PlayStation models, changing that battery was a pain. This is the second time this week that we’re seeing an easily replaceable CMOS battery, the first being from our Mac mini teardown—a trend we can get behind!
CMOS, usually pronounced “sea-moss,” stands for “Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor” and refers to a way of making transistors for integrated circuit chips, especially microcontrollers and memory chips. Its best known use is in the CMOS BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), which is the memory chip that is responsible for keeping time and date information in sync, storing hardware settings, and storing system boot configuration in volatile memory. That chip usually comes with its own little coin cell battery, so that even when your system is powered off, your clock stays in sync. One of the main indicators of a dead CMOS battery is an inability to access the internet as the correct date and time is one of the system’s basic cryptographic mechanisms for validating websites.
Like all batteries, CMOS batteries are consumables and will eventually die. Replacing them is a normal part of maintaining electronics, but far too often, they’re buried deep under other components. When we give repairability scores (which we don’t do for game consoles yet), we look at how easy it is to get to “critical components”—that is, the parts that are most likely to wear out and most vital to the functioning of the device. A CMOS battery is definitely one of those.
Sony’s engineers learned this lesson the hard way. CBOMB became a popular moniker for unpatched PS4 console owners that were losing access to their save games when the system CMOS battery died, a result of an overzealous application of anti-tamper mechanisms by Sony—something they backed down from and fixed in a subsequent patch.
But this is the first PS5 model to streamline CMOS battery access. In the PS5 and PS5 Slim, the CMOS battery is underneath the main board, which means you’ve got to take apart almost the whole thing to change it out.
In short, the CMOS battery is incredibly important to a system’s health and an easily accessible battery is very welcome.
Hoping Tool-Free Panel Removal Is Here to Stay
With the original PS5, Sony introduced an awesome tool-free panel removal design that lets you get dust out of your fan even if you can’t find your screwdriver. We’re glad to see those same easily removable panels in the PS5 Pro. If your console doubles as a cat bed, at some point you’ll need to get the cat hair out of the fan. By removing just four screws and a JST-style connector, you can take the whole fan out for a deep clean when necessary.
But that really is where any progress towards repairability ends on the PS5 Pro. Calling this an iterative improvement in design for repairability would be an understatement.
Just take the tamperproof sticker at the bottom as an example. The international version of the PS5 Pro has “WARRANTY VOID IF SEAL REMOVED/DAMAGED” over it. These stickers are actually unenforceable in the US, per the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act—and if Sony tries to give you grief about having opened up your console, you can report them to the FTC.
New Dedicated System RAM Should Amp Up Performance
There are other, far more impactful, changes to the PS5 Pro hardware when it comes to performance. The biggest of these changes concerns the allocation of an additional 2GB of DDR5 RAM dedicated to servicing the PS5 Pro’s OS.
This should free up the remaining 16GB of GDDR6 RAM to allocate towards running those demanding games. How much of this can be put down to honing and streamlining an already powerful system, and how much is out of necessity to feed the new AI-assisted upscaling? I don’t know, but I would be surprised if the AI’s memory demands weren’t a contributing factor.
If You Can’t Take the Heat, Stop Beefing Up Performance
With every chip, performance core, and teraflop of improvement also comes a headache for engineers on how to manage all the additional heat being produced. This is probably the biggest reason why any console needs to be as big as it is, as our buddy Matthew Perks demonstrates in his PS5 Slim build. It’s not the electronics that take up all that space, it’s the thermal management system.
It’s a conundrum that can only be fixed with better heat transfer materials. That means liquid metal, a material that markedly improves thermal transfer when compared to thermal paste. And that means moar copper, moar heat pipes, moar fins, and moar heatsinks. But copper is bulky, so why use it? Because it strikes a reasonable balance between thermal transfer properties and material cost. There are other options, including graphene and synthetic diamond heat spreaders, but I’m guessing that if you think $700 is expensive for a console, you’re not going to like the price tag on one with a diamond heatsink.
So! It’s the chunky console for you my lad or lass, and be happy about it too.
Baby Steps Toward Repairability
In all, we’re glad to see that the PS5 Pro has kept the best repair features of its predecessors—the toolless entry, easy-access fan, repeatable connectors on some important components. And we’re even happier to see Sony prioritizing CMOS batteries.
Now how about dropping those anti-repair fearmongering warranty stickers?
