Building the WORLDS FIRST PlayStation 5 slim

historically sony have always followed their main playstation console launchers with slimmer versions about three to four years after their initial release as their latest console the ps5 is literally their largest ever a slim version is sorely needed but as it's so new i think it's unfortunately going to be a while yet until we see a more compact version however i think it's going to be possible to make the present version slimmer how slim that slim maybe that slim how about two centimeters and for context that's a fraction more than the thickness of a dvd as we discovered in my previous ps5 videos stripping away its casing to get to the internal components is relatively straightforward leaving us with the ps5's motherboard and power supply as you can see the power supply alone takes up quite a bit of space and i'm really not sure what options i have to make it smaller yet so i'm going to brush it under the rug to deal with later [Music] focusing on the main motherboard the scale of the challenge remains as this alone still measures about five and a half centimeters thick which is just over two inches remember my target is two centimeters so i've got quite a way to go but thankfully most of this thickness comes from the cooling heatsink which has given me an idea though one that requires us to go deeper still off it comes as you can see the heatsink makes contact with the main processor in this case an soc to cool it as this is where the majority of the heat comes from it's a lot of heat as well almost 200 watts that's as much as a slow cooker on high heat but from a tiny surface area this is presumably why sony have opted to use a liquid metal to act as a thermal bridge between the soc and the heatsink as it's much more effective at transferring heat than traditional thermal pastes as it's conductive to electricity as well though i'll have to clean it off for now so that it doesn't spill onto any surrounding components in the meantime shiny so with the steel shrouding and heatsink removed things are looking a bit more promising as the motherboard itself is surprisingly thin we're not out of the woods yet though because turning it on in this state would mean that it would obviously just instantly overheat and die so we need to figure out a way of dealing with all of this heat but in a much slimmer form factor we can look towards desktop computers for some inspiration for this as a common compact way to cool their processes effectively is to use water cooling blocks these are simply mounted on top of heat generating components allowing water to be pumped through them to wick away the heat while they are much smaller than heat sinks this advantage diminishes somewhat when the tubing is attached as even when bent over almost six centimeters of headroom is still required with right angle fittings not improving matters either so a little creativity is in order you see while the top part of the water block is an important functional component of it it's actually the copper base plate that does most of the heavy lifting this has many small channels cut into it to increase the surface area in contact with water at any one time drastically improving thermal transfer as you can see this in itself is pretty thin and so long as we can get water to and from it effectively we might be in with a chance here so my plan is to build a custom water channeling system with a new material for me copper sheeting sorry brass i've got three thicknesses here in order to make a copper sandwich with the middle layer being the thickest at three millimeters for some reason copper in sheet form is ridiculously expensive and these sheets alone cost almost as much as the ps5 itself so a big thank you to my patreon supporters who donate to the channel to keep me making these crazy projects you guys rock now the first step in making this custom channeling is to trim down the first layer with a slot to fit around the various ports oh uh well we've already hit our first snag the power connector that fits into the power supply is rather tall so that needs to go much better now it's vitally important that the cooling block touches the ps5 processor directly which means that it's necessary to cut out a hole for it in this first layer refining it to the correct shape with a file despite this the rather thick rim of the block still pushes the fins too far away preventing them from being flush with the rest of the copper so it's time for some more cutting no going back [Music] perfect there are three components that still impact this layer stopping it from lying flat but they can be dealt with by drilling a few holes speaking of holes now that this layer does lie flat it's possible to mark where the motherboard mounting holes are in order to add some brass pillar supports for them that these are brass is not a coincidence they need to be made watertight and to do this i'm going to solder them to the copper itself with a blowtorch [Music] these have thankfully ended up accurate enough for the motherboard to rest on them fairly loosely meaning that there shouldn't be any pressure when it's screwed on properly later now in order to direct the water from the intake to the cooling block and then round and out again we're going to bring into play the middle copper layer which if you remember is twice as thick at three millimeters the water channel is going to be cut from this with the path i've sketched out following the same route in through a hole to the cooling block and then around and out again now the reason why i'm utilizing layers to make these channels is exemplified here which is solely that it doesn't need any fancy equipment or cnc routers to make them just a good old jigsaw with a metal blade attached i also need to make a much smaller channel adjacent to the larger off which will be for cooling an additional component that i'll be tackling later so here we have the finished article when it's mounted to the third layer which will simply be a blank lid water will be pumped over the cpu round and out again with a small amount of water entering the micro channel in and out so we've now reached a pivotal moment in this project which is to solder these layers together to make them a single watertight chamber that can then in turn hopefully cool the ps5 now my original plan for this was to simply use the blowtorch but thinking about it the actual heat output of this is very focused which means as i heat up an area another area is just going to cool down and i don't think that this thing has enough power for it to heat the whole thing if i were to move the flame over it rapidly so i need an alternative plan and this comes in the form of a little oven now my thinking here is to tin the individual layers put them in the oven which will hopefully heat them up enough to melt the solder welding them together but i'm not actually sure whether this thing can get hot enough yet so let's start with some tests the first thing i'm going to do here is prepare two pieces of copper by tinning them with some solder and then some crocodile clips can be used to clamp them together these put a constant squeezing pressure against both sides which should be helpful when the solder melts now it's worth noting that i've bought this oven specifically for this project and it will not be used for food here on out because the solder fumes can be pretty nasty anyway after about 15 minutes the bit of solder on top suddenly melts which means that the oven does indeed get hot enough how about the strips well now that they're cool i can break them apart but we can see that the solder has definitely fully melted between them as well so this method definitely has a chance of working so it's time for the real deal this again requires the layers to be tinned on both sides before putting crocodile clips around the perimeter as you may have noticed i'm doing the bottom and middle layers first just in case something goes wrong but successful a bit gooey from the flux but the two layers are definitely joined together now one thing i realized though is that it would have been all too easy for the mini channel to have filled up with solder which would have blocked it so to protect it from the next batch of soldering i'm filling it with a type of silicone grease i've had this stuff for years as a cheap thermal paste but from my experiments it resists these temperatures well enough and more importantly it dissolves in alcohol so it should be easy to remove afterwards as the middle isn't being squeezed by the crocodile clips i'm wedging in some metal to provide some central pressure and there we have it one custom ps5 water block made with hand tools and as you can see it now features some barbed inlet and outlet ports which i soldered in place separately for attaching some tubing later to get the grease out i'm using a syringe to force it out with the alcohol as i've bunged up the main channel it has nowhere to go but through the small channel which is why it's very stubborn but after soaking it for a few hours it finally bursts free this needs to be done several times before the alcohol runs clear after which i can follow it up with a diluted acid mix to clear out any of the remaining flux from the inside with the help of a water pump now as you can see there is one part conspicuously missing here which is the cooling block i've left it out until now again for fear of the channels getting filled with solder and i'm using the last of the grease to jam these full of it to hopefully prevent solder from taking its place and again once all of the grease and gunk has been cleared out it's the moment of truth is it watertight yes mission accomplished okay so with this soldered up i'm actually feeling really good about this project because not only do we know that this is now airtight which in turn makes it watertight as well but i'm also fairly confident that the water block itself hasn't filled with solder if it had it would have been game over so i'm very happy about that but as you can see it looks extremely messy and not very presentable so i think we need to give this a polish and then we can fit the ps5 into it so let's go i'm not going for a pristine finish here as it's really only an internal component and won't ever be seen but even so it's turned up looking pretty cool before i can mount the motherboard in place though there are a few additional thermal bridges that need to be made you see on the original cooling system the steel plate made contact with a few secondary heat generating components namely some flash storage and some power circuitry making sure that these components get access to the cooling ability of the water block will ensure that they're kept as cool as what they were designed for maybe even cooler and to do this i'm simply using some copper strips and thermal glue with the accompanying components receiving standard thermal paste to prepare them for mounting as for the soc that needs a new coating of liquid metal for better thermal bridging and to prevent overspill i'm tracing its perimeter with putty to seal around it much like on the original heatsink with the same being mirrored on the copper side to ensure that it makes good contact i'm using the original rear bracket to put downward pressure on the back of the processor and in addition to that there are some components on this side of the board that also need some thermal bridging though this time to a lid that i've not made yet these aren't particularly power hungry components so having the heat dissipated to a lid should be quite adequate for them but this isn't the case at all for the vrms which are in a row right here these regulate the power input and as a result they generate too much heat to be dealt with passively by the lid on the original ps5 sony kept them cool by using a heat pipe to link them to a small heat sink a heat pipe for those who don't know isn't just a rod of copper but is actually hollow with a wick covering the internal surface as there's a liquid inside that has a low boiling point this liquid evaporates from the wick whenever heat is applied and then moves as a vapor to cooler areas where it condenses again before soaking back into the wick where the process starts all over again this moves heat rapidly and effectively but the shape of the original won't fit my new design so i'm gonna have to make my own thankfully it's fairly easy to buy brand new heat pipes online and after warming it up it's possible to bend it fairly easily into the required shape what's not so easy however is soldering heat pipes to anything as if you heat them up too much they can explode cooling one side with a damp cloth though worked for me and i was able to mount it to the original copper spreader all this by the way is what the additional mini water channel is for as it cools a stack of copper which in turn cools the heat pipe and with that all the thermal bridges have been made and it's looking pretty slim but there's a big problem that could spoil the party where's the power supply going to go as you've seen already it's kind of big in a bit of a weird shape and it begs the question where have sony put the power supply in their past slimline consoles well in the past two playstation slim releases they drastically lowered the console's overall power consumption which meant that their internal power supplies could be much smaller though capable of delivering far less power unfortunately for us there's no way we can reduce the ps5's overall power requirement to allow the use of these smaller power supplies but there is still one option we can explore which sony and other console makers have resorted to in the past making the power supply external both the ps1 and ps2 slim offloaded power to an external power brick to make them smaller a strategy also used in several xbox consoles as well while it's not ideal we are trying to push things to the extreme here so it's a compromise i'm willing to make in order to prepare for this i need to solder some really thick wire to the ps5 power input to reduce the voltage drop down its length and routing it around to exit between the barbed connectors allows me to hide it between the two lengths of rubber tubing that will carry water to and from the cooling block this stuff is a bit thicker than i'd like but at least it's nice and robust and to match it aesthetically with the rest of the build i thought it would be cool to sheath it with some copper braiding which also provides grounding to the chassis so with that done we're ready to add the lid earlier i used the cooling block as a template for making this using the last bits of copper and soldering them together which ended up looking pretty neat while i am going for a minimal look here i do need to make some holes for the usb ports and also for a power button as i want to make this power button also act as a power light indicator we can take the ps5's original lighting strip board and glue a brass tube over its leds with some epoxy the leds should light up this epoxy which will be visible through the tube but we'll have to wait until later to see how well this works as the led board itself doesn't actually feature a button of any kind some glue can be used at the other end to anchor it so that when pressed it can trigger a little push button mounted behind it like so this push button in turn is wired up to the original power button and will thus trigger the ps5 to turn on or off when pressed as i earlier soldered some brass pillars to the internal corners of this cover it can be screwed in place from underneath with some rubber pads providing some feet here as well to tidy up the rear side it has its own special cover and to make the tubing look a bit neater i've used my trusty prusa to print off a few plastic brackets to clip it at various points essentially turning it into a tether despite being fairly bulky it's not really that noticeable when the unit is in position especially as like most set-top devices it will have other cables like hdmi going into the back of it anyway either way it looks great in my book and the polished copper provides a unique refreshing aesthetic the best bit of course is that it measures just 1.9 centimeters we've actually beaten my two centimeter goal and it's now a fraction of the thickness of the original crazy before we can turn it on though and test out whether the cooling block performs well enough to keep the system cool during use i do still need to sort out a power supply which as you know is inspired by previous ps5 slim releases the only difference with mine is that it's going to have to handle cooling as well which makes things challenging but also very interesting but before we get on with that one thing you'll notice with this build is that it's taken a lot of time and effort even just to get to this point and even though i've mostly used hand tools i doubt that many of you are going to put the time and energy into copying what i've done here but that's okay because making your ps5 slimmer and cooler isn't actually as hard as all this which leads me neatly onto a quick ad from the sponsor of this video dbrand who make what they call dark plates 2.0 which are replacement ps5 side panels with some awesome new features the most apparent being that they have a built-in vent which improves airflow to the fan resulting in more effective cooling mounting them is as simple as clipping them in place and as you can see they give the ps5 a completely different aesthetic thanks to their new shape i'll be honest the ps5's original protruding collar has grown a bit old in my book so it's great to have a smarter alternative especially as they're available in different tones now i'd imagine that redesigning these panels from the ground up was a huge challenge but dbrand's efforts have certainly paid off because the quality is just as good as the originals and they fit perfectly now if you want even more customization options dbrand's got you covered there as well as they've got a variety of high quality vinyl skins that can be used to easily change the appearance and texture of the central glossy plastic and they have the added benefit of being much more resistant to fingerprints and scratches something the original gloss finish was very susceptible to and their cool light filters are something else entirely so visit dbrand.com diy dark plates if you'd like to customize your ps5 to put your own style to it and don't forget that dbrand offers skins for all sorts of other devices too for you to make them your own so thank you dbrand for sponsoring this video and let's get back to the project so with these tethers now added i need to make a power brick that can not only provide power for the ps5 but also cool it as well now in terms of power the power brick that was originally inside the ps5 is not only a super weird shape but it doesn't feature its own fan instead being designed to rely on the console's own airflow to keep itself cool strapping a fan onto it to keep it cool just looks stupid so ideally i'd like to get rid of it and use something else entirely taking a close look at its specs we can see that it outputs 31 amps at 12 volts and thankfully it appears to present this voltage without being connected up to the ps5 so in theory we can indeed swap it out with any sufficiently powerful 12-volt alternative i have this much more sensibly shaped computer power supply on hand that will do the trick and to make it a bit prettier i've made a case out of aluminium to go around it though you might be wondering why it's so long well that's to make room for the cooling components which have been provided for this build by alphacool the main one of which is this slimline cooling radiator after adding some fans to push air through it and a set of water pumps to circulate the water it can be fitted to the casing alongside the power supply and be linked up to the ps5's new tubing now as is normal for water cooling loops it needs a special type of coolant and i'm using a temporary reservoir to make filling it a bit easier as the copper of the main ps5 body and the aluminium casing of this power cooling unit both block wi-fi signals i've extended the antennas down to be glued to the exterior of this for an unobstructed signal while it's not the prettiest thing in the world it actually won't ever be seen as the idea is for it to mount to the wall behind a tv and with that the unit is complete and we're ready to test it out now it would be a little bit of an understatement to say that i'm nervous because i've worked on this for a couple of months and uh let's hope it works come on [Music] okay so 12 volts is being supplied to it as expected um but there is one thing that i'm hoping is the cause which is simply that the fan isn't plugged in after all i've had computers before that won't turn on without a fan so maybe that's the case here as well [Music] but unfortunately not [Music] look it's going what i did was just um where the power lead goes in here i just uh bridged the connections so that's great because that's uh not that hard [Music] and we are now working so what i've done is basically just bypass the original power button and it's little strip and just solder it straight onto the motherboard and it's working which is great hey that little beep of triumph there we go that's a relief so getting it turned on is obviously great but the whole point of this thing was to obviously make it thin but it needs to perform just as well as the original console in terms of keeping the playstation cool so step one turns on step two need to make sure it actually works properly so let's run some games and uh see if it's kept cool little did i know that things were about to go horribly wrong uh that's not good it's frozen feels okay whoa [Applause] [Music] this isn't where this is going to be permanently fitted so i had it propped up on this and it had fallen over blocking the intake which is on the bottom here so there was no airflow and the ps5 presumably overheated so let's hope it's not done any permanent damage come on i'm just fed up we've got another problem a bigger one this time it's now not turning on so the light comes on and then it just goes off and there's nothing i can do to change it and to have made such a stupid mistake right at the project's completion killing the ps5 stone dead is devastating so i am incredibly disappointed but i'm not going to give up because dbrand actually sent over a spare ps5 to use for the b-roll for their sponsor spot and i am going to borrow the motherboard from this to hopefully get the system running again so sorry dbrand if you're wondering where your ps5 is um well here's your answer why you've not uh received it back yet anyway the process of transplanting the motherboard isn't terribly difficult but this time i'm including a few thermal probes so we can monitor the ps5's temperatures at various points to make sure it's all working within spec so with the cooling unit mounted more securely this time it's the moment of truth white come on come on yes oh thank you d brand at last now before i do anything else i'm going to test out the temperatures on this thing so we can hopefully avoid every uh a reshoot of what happened earlier so i'm going to run horizon forbidden west which is a new title and it should push the ps5 to its limits but i'm going to be monitoring the thermals through my thermal probes so let's hope it goes well after leaving the game running for several hours the first news is that it hasn't frozen this time and checking out the temperatures we can start to see why the main processor probe reports a maximum temperature of just 46 celsius as the probe isn't actually inside the silicon though my best guess is that it's somewhere around 65 degrees internally but still a good result what about the memory this one should be fairly accurate as the probe has been embedded within the heat spreader itself and we get a result of 52 degrees here the vrms are even cooler at 44 degrees indicating that the heat pipe is doing its job yay so great results but how do they compare to the original untouched ps5 well i positioned my thermal probes as closely as possible to how the guys over at gamers nexus mounted theirs when they were doing a detailed thermal analysis of the console and there are some interesting findings here their processor measurement hit 75 celsius though again this was taken from the back so it wouldn't surprise me if the actual silicon temperature was in the 80 degrees celsius range at least as for their ram measurements they reported that it hits 94 degrees celsius and that it's likely running a bit too close to its maximum allowable temperature so the 52 degrees we're getting is really good news as are the results for the vrms the original cooler 71 degrees celsius the water cooled ps5 44 degrees celsius cool literally it's likely that we can get these temperatures even lower as well if we were to use a larger cooler but that's a video for another time so there we have it the world's first ps5 slim i still can't quite believe just how thin we've managed to make this and that it works better at keeping the console cool than the original cooler did well that's just an extra cherry on top now of course we did have a few setbacks so massive thank you has to go out to dbrand for rescuing this project by sacrificing their own ps5 although they don't know it yet so make sure you support them by maybe buying some dark plates for your own ps5 or buying perhaps a skin for your smartphone and of course if you want to support this channel directly you can do so at patreon.com diy perks or maybe buy a cool t-shirt like this one diy perks fan but other than that i'm matt you've been watching diy perks and i hope to see you next time goodbye for now

Channel: DIY Perks

Views: 16,369,780

Keywords:

Id: he6xyl_MHXY

Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Ar0ndight]

I love this guy’s content. Always positive vibes and super smart (if not always practical) ideas and projects. He perfectly embodies what I go to youtube for

[u/MumrikDK]

I'm sort of surprised it was possible to fry the console by blocking the radiator air intake. Water was still being circulated and there was quite a lot of copper strapped to the heat sources, so I would have thought the device had plenty of time to throttle and shutdown, regardless of which component overheated. It's a device you know tons of people are going to make the mistake of putting in a small sealed space in TV furniture.

[u/HyKaliber]

DIY Perks is truly the epitome of videos I love. Long form, DIY Projects based around technology.

Water cooling an LED or making a Fan, powered by hydro-kinetics? Into my V E I N S

[u/campionmusic51]

he reminds me of the old 80s/90s BBC or ITV children’s presenters. very cheerful, reassuring demeanour. makes me feel 10 years old, again.

[u/BlackedWebbing]

This guy's fucking nuts. I've watched all of his videos and it's amazing you can build it yourself. I'm planning on making the mic he made.

[u/akise]

All this care and effort, only to prop the radiator up using a flimsy plastic tub. That hurt to see.

Cool project nonetheless.

[u/onthefence928]

MFW the cooling solution costs more than the actual device

[u/avboden]

Neat project, but the volume of the external cooling/PSU seems greater than the original volume of the entire PS5 to begin with. So it's not really about being slim, it's about just making a water-cooled PS5

[u/NewRedditIsVeryUgly]

I was hoping it would be all-in-one without anything external, but then it would have to be much wider and longer to keep the "under 2cm" thickness target. It would look like a large slim brick.
You can still use multiple slim fans (1.5cm) blowing down to a large 0.5cm heatsink connected to multiple heatpipes, but that would be complicated to arrange.