Building a REAL PlayStation 5 Gaming Tablet

despite the popularity of portable games consoles big player Sony hasn't released one in this category for over 10 years and no the PlayStation portal doesn't count because all it can do is stream games from a full-sized PS5 but the thing is Sony have everything they need to make a proper portable console right now you see compared to when it was first launched the PlayStation 5 has had a significant internal redesign with the components like the motherboard being completely refreshed to be a lot smaller and honestly it's now pretty tiny considering that this is a full PS5 that can be held with two fingers and this has got me thinking surely it's possible to convert this into a portable console of course it's never going to be quite like a handheld but there is a format for gaming that's not been explored much yet which I think will have huge potential a PlayStation 5 tablet edition the first challenge before making this a reality though is that the PS5 is more than its motherboard alone it requires many extra components to make it work most of which are dedicated just to keeping it cool as it generates so much heat trimming all this down to a size that can be considered portable is going to be a Monumental challenge but where there's a will there's a way take the main heat sink for example it's a fairly weird shape and occupies a lot of space but one action we can take is to swap it out for one that's much shorter and wider though with approximately the same cooling capacity as its base is solid copper it can be easily drilled and tapped to add screw holes to it which are perfect for using some aluminium lengths to mount it adjacent to the main motherboard rather than on top of it which makes for a shallower profile even still particularly when compared to the original but how on Earth are we going to get any heat generated by the processor over to it in this configuration heat pipes of course heat pipes for those who don't know are Hol copper tubes that have a rough texture on the inside walls as they're normally sealed with a small amount of liquid inside heat can be transferred very rapidly from one end to the other by the liquid literally boiling inside and condensing wherever it's the coolest making them ridiculously good at moving heat around the ones I've got are designed to be mounted to a little copper block but unfortunately I can't just this block to the processor as is you see as the ps5s processor generates almost 200 WS worth of heat it's necessary to use a thermal interface material referred to as liquid metal and if I were to use this with my block it would eventually absorb into the raw copper and stop working properly interestingly the base of the original heat sink is copper as well but Sony has nickel plated it making it far more resistive to liquid metal absorption and this is actually actually great news because it turns out that nickel plating is surprisingly easy to do at home so it's time for a quick side quest all that's needed for this is some white vinegar and nickel strips plus a dash of salt by connecting the strips to the positive and negative terminals of a battery or a power supply one of the nickel strips can be dissolved into the solution giving us an electrolyte that can be used for electroplating to use it all we need to do is replace the dissolved nickel strip and swap out the other one for the block this allows the nickel to be transferred from the new strip over to the block giving us a nickel plated finish after a quick polish this looks perfect and it should now work reliably with the liquid metal this stuff is like magic it's literally molten metal as it's made up of various components to achieve a very low melting point once it's been spread to both the processor dye and the now nickel plated block the whole thing can be squashed together as the surface area intended to be in contact with the heat pipes is pretty large it's actually okay to go with traditional thermal paste here after which the heat pipes themselves can be finally mounted in place these have been carefully bent to go around various components and so that they spread out on the heat sink and it looks pretty cool with the processor now thermally linked to the heat sink we're almost ready to test it out but how are we going to move air over the heat sink to keep it cool the original rather gargantuan blower fan is simply out of the question due to its size but what about using several mini versions instead using four of these in parallel multiplies their airflow output hopefully to the point where they'll match the much larger fan the sheer size difference between these two types of fans is so large though that I actually have my doubts as to whether the new ones are even capable of cooling the processor which again is 200 100 WS worth of heat and that's a lot but there's only one way to know for sure and that's to try it out by positioning these new fans along one Edge they blow air underneath the console and by taping the sides the air has only one way out through the heat sink now this of course looks super juny right now especially with the power supply just perched on top but it does allow us to operate the console and observe its temperature with a thermal camera as soon as the console is on we can see that the heat pipes start moving the heat over to the heat sink once the game is launched though the console begins to draw its maximum power and the temperatures continue to climb with the block itself hitting over 60° C it's safe to assume that the core of the processor will be even higher than this so it's no wonder that after a few moments the console shuts itself down with an over temperature warning message so clearly there's more work to do here if we want to have any chance of this being cool properly but there are thankfully two easy ways we can improve things increase the air flow over the heat sink so we can pull heat away from it more quickly or increase the heat sink size so we have more heat dissipation surface but preferably it would be both of these things if we can pull it off now as the present heat sink fits very nicely on the side here instead of increasing its size I'm going to add an additional smaller heat sink instead to provide the extra heat dissipation surface area mounting it does require some modification of the heat pipe layout but doing so provides the perfect opportunity to optimize things further by spreading them out more so that they go diagonally across the fins rather than parallel to them allowing them to dump heat more effectively into the heat sinks as for increasing air flow over the heat sinks the cheap generic fans I used during testing just aren't anywhere close to being good enough so after some intense research online I'm going to replace them with some highly engineered models designed for high high power laptops not only do these push more air while being quieter but they're bidirectional as well meaning that they can blow air over both heat sinks at once despite the heat sinks being at opposite ends of the motherboard being on the back here they can also cool the small components on the board too thanks to some additional mini heat sinks and copper bridging pads with some 3D printed air du to control the airflow so how well does this revision work well rigging it up testing reveals some legitimately shocking results not only is the console more than happy to run indefinitely with this new cooling setup but it does so with a huge amount of Headroom with the block itself now hovering at just 42 Cel at full load this means that the speed of the fans could be ramped down significantly to the point where they make only a soft weing sound and I'll be doing some tests against a gaming laptop later so you can hear it for yourself so this second attempt at the cooling system works a treat as it not only keeps the console cool but it does its job quietly as well which I was really not expecting to be possible um but as you can see it looks a bit like an engineering prototype right now um so we need to focus a bit on the Aesthetics to make it look a bit more like a manufactured product Sony's design language for the PS5 leans heavily into a high contrust two-tone look so taking inspiration from this I've designed a shell that can be 3D printed it's a little big to print in one go so I've split it up to print in several separate pieces with the intention of gluing them together this technique allows some parts to be printed in different tones as well providing the high contrast black and white appearance and I think it's ended up looking pretty smart as the main body likes a uniform perimeter for the shell to be fitted to though it's necessary to add some aluminum trim to provide a robust frame even so it's not quite time to put the shell on yet as an important component needs needs to be considered the speakers you see most portable consoles have some form of sound system but they're usually pretty thin sounding and not great for a full gaming experience so to get around this I'm going to include a miniature subwoofer consisting of two 5 wat drivers to fill in the low frequency sounds and I think it will provide some serious bass especially being complemented by two stereo side speakers now making speaker enclosures at this scale isn't particularly easy and I have to admit they don't look very neat but that's okay because the intention is to cap them off with the remaining 3D prined trim with that done the shell can now finally be lowered on top to hide all of the internal components which suddenly makes it look a lot more complete with a subtle but definitely present PlayStation Vibe and with the help of a little kickstand it is indeed starting to look like a tablet granted it is a little on the chunky side but do keep in mind that there's a full PS5 inside here and when compared to the original console it's actually quite remarkable how much we've been able to shrink it down this size Advantage remains even when compared to the PS5 slim which is the thinnest official PS5 to date which is very satisfying this leaves us with pretty much the last job which is of course to add the screen now you might be thinking that I'm just going to go with a standard LCD panel from a laptop for this but I've got a better idea which we'll get to after a quick break you see making a custom PS5 is a tricky timec consuming process that literally takes weeks but needed thanks to this video's sponsor dbrand now you may have already heard of dark plates 2.0 D Brand's popular replacement side panels for the PS5 they are slim feature built-in vents for improved Cooling and lose the popped color look that personally I've gotten a little bit fed up off you can also inject a bit of your own style by picking from a selection of designs for the middle skin I've got one of their new skin options which are real X-Ray scans of the ps5s internals allowing the engineering to be shown off here we can actually see the coils and Transformer in the power supply as well as the heat pipes and their accompanying fins they've actually scanned a load of different devices too I've got one for my phone which makes it a lot more interesting to me as things like the US B port and internal speakers are made visible but their latest release is actually a tempered dust screen protector for the PS portal it's super easy to install and is a great way of protecting it as the screen is pretty exposed especially when it's shoved into a bag actually S as dbrand will be watching this I know haven't quite added the screen just yet to my build but I don't know if you guys could do a custom cut version of this specially for it um you know my address if you could do that but uh while we wait for that answer visit dbrand.com /d perks if you'd like to pick up some dark plates a phone skin or glass for your PlayStation portal but other than that thank you dbrand for sponsoring this video and let's get back to the project the next step of which is of course to add the screen now the problem with LCDs and why I don't really want to use one is that they suffer from motion smearing and poor black level performance so instead let's go with OLED these provide pixel level dimming for incredibly vibrant images but as they're still a bit hard to get hold of in panel form I'm salvaging mine from a busted laptop there's really no contest when it comes to image quality here with the OLED panel being in a league of its own for sure with a much brighter and more Vivid image with no motion smearing top tier performance for a top tier console as the display itself is so thin though I think it's a good idea to reinforce it with a super stiff custom cut carbon fiber back panel which protects it from bending if it were ever to be pushed in the middle this finishes off the unit beautifully and it finally looks like a real product but before I can test it out there's a bit of an elephant in the room how on Earth is it going to be powered you see the motherboard itself needs a 12vt power supply in order to turn on now the original one is a super weird shape and is kind of massive especially compared to how small the console is now so we're going to swap it out for a much smaller gallium nitride alternative despite its high power capability it's actually smaller than many laptop power bricks so is a good choice for this project to hook it up to the PlayStation instead of going with plain paired wire which is ugly not to mention stiff my plan is to get a single core of large gauge silicon wire to carry the positive voltage Supply and sleeve it with copper for ground making for a highly flexible low resistance power cable after adding some custom High current connectors it can be finished off with some beautiful silver and white sleeving which matches the aesthetic of the unit nicely this can now be plugged into the back of the PlayStation completing the build it's taken so much effort to reach this point but it looks amazing which means we're ready to try it out y there we go the world's first PlayStation 5 tablet edition that's pretty cool my first impression is the Brilliance of the screen being OLED it of course has Inky dark blacks for vibrant color rendition but as it's full 4K as well it really takes advantage of the ps5s insane rendering power and it looks incredibly sharp 4K portable gaming man this this is pretty unique oh listen listen to the subw 3 2 let's go here we go wa oh man this is crazy just to prove it no display cable just a power cable and uh yeah full PS5 in a nice portable package wild the best thing about this form factor is that it's portable enough to actually be a social experience you're not bound to a TV so it can be used pretty much anywhere perfect for sharing a gaming experience with friends come on I did it own goal James this is in stark contrast to the solo and potentially lonely experience you get with most other portable gaming consoles and it really is a super unique experience that brings a lot of fun to the table what's even more remarkable is just how quiet it is thanks to the large heat sinks and three bidirectional fans it makes far less noise than you'd expect here's a comparison to a high-end laptop that doesn't even draw as much power so while it's definitely audible compared to a full-sized PS5 it's not bad at all especially considering it's so portable and I'd say Mission very much accomplished so why hasn't anyone made a console like this honestly I'm not quite sure because I think it's got a lot going for it but it's likely down to it just being an unproven form factor no one knows yet whether a console like this would sell well so you guys will have to let me know your thoughts in the comments down below now I think if Sony themselves were to make a console like this they could probably make it about one third of the thickness and it shouldn't even really be that much more expensive than a PlayStation 5 because really this is just a PlayStation 5 plus a screen the extra components are just in a different form factor so it' be really interesting to see if this kind of thing becomes a bit more common in the future let's hope so but until then if you've got an itch to custom ize your own PS5 don't forget to check out dbrands dark plates which are a great way of making your PS5 your very own um but other than that the concepts that we've learned in this video are actually going to be applied to my next project which will be something that's very not visible now if you're familiar with the channel you'll know exactly what I'm talking about but if you're not make sure you're subscribed because you don't want to miss it but other than that I'm Matt you've been watching DIY perk and I hope I see you next time goodbye for [Music] now

Channel: DIY Perks

Views: 3,453,849

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Id: W4PHhurAhwc

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024