Look at this, you guys, a PlayStation 5 Slim. I can't believe it. And, oh my goodness, we've already completely taken it apart because of course we have. Since its inception, the PS5 has been a real big boy and I'm sure loads of you are excited to be able to put the console in your media cabinet instead of beside it. But these days, you can't trust a company to just improve the new one. There's always a catch. Just like dbrand miraculously catched this PS5 Slim for us as it fell out of thin air. Seriously, they won't even tell us how they got it. But they did well before they're supposed to hit store shelves on November the 10th. I hope no robots were hurt in the process. You can check out their dark plates down below if you wanna make your PlayStation 5 regardless of whether it's the old kind or the slim kind that look better. And with that out of the way, let's get right into it all the way in. The Ridge. Simplify your life with the Ridge wallet. It's slim design allows you to carry your essential cards and cash without weighing you down. So don't wait, just follow the link below and use code Linus to save 10% on your purchase and get free shipping. I don't think I can remember the last time we did a straight up unboxing on this channel, but this is it. The PlayStation 5 Slim with everything you liked and probably pretty much everything you didn't like about the original PlayStation 5. Let's go ahead and get it cracked open. Look, it's been a while, okay? Oh, Jesus. Okay, in the top, we've got a non-revised, exactly the same DualSense controller that we've come to know and love. With the great haptic feedback we've come to know and love, the touch pad on the top, and of course, their adaptive triggers, which can have their resistance adjusted depending on how the game developer intends. If you're pulling back a bow or whatever else, it feels a little bit more immersive. Alex and I compared this to a cheap racing wheel recently and found that it wins. It's a really good controller. HDMI cable. Oh, that's an interesting, like, are they going for like an eco-friendly vibe here? The non-dyed twist ties? Modern Warfare 3 code. Oh, no, it's just an operator pack. Remember when things used to come with actual games? That was cool. Well, here, I don't care about any of this, so you can have my pin, whoever watches first. There you go. What am I looking at here? Uh-huh. This must be something to do with dbrand. I will figure it out later. Quick start guide. Shout out, Sony, again, for having such a user-friendly means of expanding the storage on this console. There have been lots of consoles that have offered the ability to expand your storage or replace the stock storage, but to make it this user-friendly and have it right in the quick start guide, how to put a commodity off-the-shelf SSD into your console, no, it's never been done, and it makes Microsoft look like money grubbers this generation around. Oh, it's glossy. Oh, it's partially glossy. It's only glossy on the top. It's like they thought, you know what everyone really liked about the original PlayStation 5 was the popped collar look? How about a shiny popped collar? It's a lot smaller, though. You know what? Looking at those leaked pictures online, it felt like it wasn't really that much smaller, but it's way smaller. Here, let's get this stuff out of the way so we can really get a nice size comparison here. It's got about the same width, and that makes sense because you're gonna need to fit all of the internals plus cooling, plus have room for air to get into the, looks like, intakes, which, oh, are actually a little less obstructed this time around. I wonder if Sony took some hints from our provider of the PS5 Slim. Hey, what an idea. Maybe, oh, actually, speaking of which, here it is, the original PS5 with dbrand Darkplates 2.0. There is a little bit of a fisheye effect to our top-down, so to make sure you guys are getting the cleanest possible look at these, I'm gonna remove the third one for now. So we'll go PS5, Darkplates PS5. All it does is kind of get rid of the popped collar and offer a little bit more airflow. PS5 versus PS5 Slim. It's kind of a reasonable size. The only argument against this that I can think of is, well, I already reconfigured my whole stupid media console to fit the original one anyway. What do I need the Slim one for now? Thank you very much, Sony. But as someone who doesn't have a PS5 yet, this is an extremely welcome change. Oh, and they've made some improvements to the IO as well. Gone is the front USB Type-A to be replaced with another USB Type-C. This actually makes a lot of sense because the PSVR2 is out now and uses one of those front Type-C connectors. So obviously, if you wanna use a Type-C dock or something like that, or a Type-C hub at the front, you're not really able to do that anymore if you've got the PSVR2 connected. Other than, oh, where's the eject? Oh, that makes sense. That makes sense. Because all PS5 Slims are the same except for whether they have the add-on disc module or not. So the eject button wouldn't be on the front of the console itself. It would be right on the optical drive right here. Fascinating. I consider this a big win because as someone who doesn't use a PlayStation very often, or even just like kids and stuff, right? It's really confusing having your power button and your eject button right next to each other. I mean, it's not the same as it was on older consoles where if you hit the power button by accident, it's like, oh no, where's everything? Like, it'll go to sleep, it's okay. But it's just annoying. Have they changed anything else about the IO? I mean, they changed, it's not really IO, but there's no stand included anymore. That's got people kind of upset. You can pull out this little butt plug here though, and you can put a stand on if you want to pay what was like 30 or $40 though. 30 bucks. That's pretty rough. And then at the back, I actually like the new style of the vent. I think that looks really clean. We get a nice little speed bump to our USB. The original PlayStation 5 had two 5G ports and two 10G ports. And this one has three 10G ports and one 5G port. Power in, HDMI 2.1. Overall, this is looking like a really nice little upgrade. Sure, you don't get a stand, but also, I don't know, it doesn't really need one. It's not so top-heavy anymore. And they haven't ripped away any core functionality like we saw with previous PlayStations, where it's like, oh, you got the launch one, you get backwards compatibility, yeah! Not anymore. With that said, it's not like the upgrade is completely cut and dried. You see, it's reduced in volume by more than 30%, especially if you compare it to the not-dark-plated one. This is a little less impressive because it doesn't have that. And it's been reduced in weight by 18 and 24%. How can it be reduced in weight by two different percentages? Ah, so you might not realize that this is the second time that Sony has revised the PS5. At launch, it used TSMC's seven-nanometer node, but Sony quietly revised it to use their six-nanometer node, apparently for higher yields. Remember how at first these things were basically unobtainium? It also apparently helped with the thermals. Remember when these things ran super hot at first? That's why they don't anymore, and that's why the PS5 Slim is 18 to 24% lighter because the six-nanometer version used a smaller cooler and thus was lighter than the original seven-nanometer one. Now, what node the PS5 Slim is on, we're not entirely sure, but we've seen leaks saying that it's six-nanometer, five-nanometer, and four-nanometer. So I guess we'll need to measure the die and then maybe take an educated guess at it. Now, since we have the Slim before we're supposed to, connecting it to the internet for the first time was a little bit scary. Fortunately, the phone home wasn't a problem, which is good because this thing is literally useless without Sony's servers giving it a sniff. For instance, one of the cool new things about the PS5 Slim, even if it's a bit controversial because of the pricing, is that the digital version can be upgraded later to add the disc reader. So let's just go ahead and show how that works. There's the cover plate and, oh, okay. It's three screws. Just pull on it. Oh, you don't even need, well, I don't know, you just, oh! Oh. Wow. That's kinda great, actually. Super painless. Well, other than the fact that in order for this thing to work, you have to register the unit online and bind it to your PlayStation 5. Though, we were informed by a viewer after WAN Show that apparently this is not something that Sony does by choice. For now, I guess I'll just, oh, not put this back on because we're about to start our teardown. Uh, what do I need? iFixit kit? Because the truth is the LTT screwdriver is not great for everything, which is one of the reasons that I need the LTT backpack so that I can also carry around an iFixit kit. By the way, the units shipping now have regular zipper pulls until we get you guys a carabiner one later, so you don't have to worry about any fragility in the carabiners, lttstore.com. Why don't we start by trying to remove the rest of the panel? Oh, uh, okay. Whoop, well, I'm having fun. Man, without the plates on it, this is almost a downright reasonable size, eh? Look at that. In case you were curious, I certainly was, this is the connector they're using for the optical drive. Based on the pin count, I couldn't even begin to guess what it is. It's certainly not USB or SATA. Maybe it's even PCIe. But why for an optical drive? Unless you could possibly use it for other things in the future. That'd be super cool. One thing I can tell you you won't need that for is a storage upgrade. It is just as easy to replace your drive in the PS5 Slim, and they've even maintained compatibility for up to 110 millimeter M.2s, even though those are quite rare. Love to see it. Speaking of storage, yet another upgrade that I haven't even mentioned yet is that the all digital version went from 825 gigs to one terabyte. I guess that's what super cheap NAND flash will do for you. Let's get this fan pulled out here. As interesting as it looks though, what we really wanna know is how loud it is. To find out, we threw this thing at the labs before we took it apart to get some measurements. Here's our audio testing setup. Now we don't yet have an anechoic chamber, but we do have an EMC chamber, which is not anechoic, but is at least really quiet in here, somewhere in the 20 dB range. We don't actually know, because the noise floor in here is lower than what our microphone can pick up. That said though, we just simply take our PS5, have it here. Spider-Man's jumping up and down, so we're always getting those new frames, and then we just give it a little spin. Do that a bunch of times to find out where it's the loudest, and we're good to go. And now we have to leave, so we don't screw up Dan's testing. Everybody quiet! Seriously? All four of the screws for this fan are different? You have got to be kidding me, Sony. Three different lengths, two of which go into metal, two of which go into plastic. Unbelievable. Okay, no, I'm over it, I'm over it, because the results are good. Looking at the results, the original PlayStation 5 does a great job of making sure that all the noise is directed toward the back of the unit, rather than toward the user. And that continues here, but that doesn't mean there weren't some differences. Both were so quiet at idle and in the menu that they were below the noise floor of our EMC chamber, which makes sense since the fans were barely spinning, if at all. And in games, neither of them exceeded 35 decibels. But the characteristics of that sound were slightly different, with the original PS5 having kind of an even emission of sound toward the back of the unit, and the Slim being ever so slightly quieter overall, but louder on the side of the optical drive. So if for whatever reason you keep your PlayStation 5 kind of behind you and to this side, no, this side, there we go, you may prefer the OG rather than the Slim. Whichever one you decide you like, we're gonna have links to them down below. Now things are about to get really tricky, because we discovered that this whole thing with the screws being all different is a bit of a theme here. So I need the motherboard out and in my hands basically. Oh, hold on. There's one screw I missed. The warranty void if removed screw. Oh, look at that. There's a little, oh, it's cute. There's a little PlayStation thing on it. Hey, there it is though. First look at the inside of the PS5 Slim. Ooh, it's shiny. Huh. That is not as big, oh, there it is. Wow, that's a really small heatsink. My goodness. No, that's just cooling whatever this is attached to and the bulk of the, ah, yes, there it is. It's not only on this side here, but also internally here. There we go. Yeah, that makes way more sense. Time to take out some more screws. This is a funky little ribbon connector. First thing we gotta do is pop this out. Okay, so that's the lock. And then we grab this and, ooh, oh, hello. Hello, little buddy. What do you do? Oh, wow, the whole, that's it? Hold on a second. No, no, we got our wifi antennas. Let's get those removed. Geez, I can't believe how easily this thing comes apart. Other than using all doofusy different screws, this is not bad. To the chassis. Oh no, we're not, wow, look at that. Oh, whoa, whoa, careful. Don't wanna bend that heat pipe. Oh, huh, there's your front IO daughterboard. Okay, so that's all that does is your power button and then, well, okay, two high-speed USB-Cs. Yeah, you'd obviously want some good high-integrity signaling there. Let's have a look at the power supply. Wait, oh, oh, cool. Oh, this is hilarious. Labs has a note in the script about how they were able to get that warranty void if removed sticker off without tripping the thing. I was wondering why it was still all black. Well, good job with the heat gun, you guys. I definitely ruined it. Now let's talk about the power supply. For what I think are pretty obvious reasons, I'm not gonna be opening this up, but we do have some stuff to say about it, first and foremost being that it is rated for exactly the same amount of power as the old one. 12 volts, 31 amps, so 372 watts. We did some testing, though, and the results surprised us. The PS5 Slim was identical to the old one. We were expecting it to be different in some way, so at idle, we were looking at about four watts. On the home screen, roughly 50 watts, and in-game, about 225 watts. One really weird thing we noticed, though, is that if you go back to the home screen without closing your game, you're still seeing power draw around 160 watts, which is way more than the 50 we were seeing before. This means the game is far less suspended than we would've expected, so definitely make sure to properly close your games when you're done, or you could see it on your power bill. Now, given that the PS5 and the PS5 Slim are within margin of error in terms of power consumption, maybe this is not a new Node, in fact, and just a redesigned PCB, which is a bit disappointing because we were hoping for a more efficient console. There is a way for us to know for sure-ish, though. Oh boy, my notes say this is as far as we went. So we're in uncharted territory now. Do I really have to take out all these screws? I'm just gonna get a power tool. Y'all ready for this? Hopefully these are all the same, because I'm not keeping track. So far they are. I don't know why there are so many screws, but I get the feeling that once we've got them all off, we're gonna have some idea why. I wonder, is it also screwed in from the other side? That would be hilarious. This is like, this isn't riveted, is it? See the problem, right? Oh, here we go, here we go. No, no, I got, yeah, yeah, get that, yeah. There you go, go for it. Whoa, okay, don't bend it. Do we have any more? Oh, hey, there we go. Okay, look. Let's... Wow, that is not a lot of thermal compound. They've just got little dots on each of the DRAM packages and the NAND packages too, actually. We're looking at 16 gigs of GDDR6 from Micron here. Here's our NAND packages for probably half of our one terabyte of storage. And then here's our chipset, as well as a DRAM cache, presumably for the SSD here. It's funny how as soon as they switch to the internals, all the screws use the same head and are the same length. What a weird, oops. That's fine, that was fine. Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. Okay, was this on wrong? Is this supposed to go in the same direction as the other thing? Probably not, probably fine. I'm sure Sony knows how to put these together. I mean, I could give them some pointers. Oh, that sound though. Watch out, there is liquid metal in there. There's liquid metal in there? Oh, balls, that makes sense. Oh, I found another screw. There's your problem. There's your problem right there. Whoa! Liquid metal. Liquid metal shim to ensure that it doesn't leak and get all over your PCB. And you can see, it is not that easy to contain. It's all pooled up on this side over here, which is pretty wild. There indeed are the other two NAND packages. Wow, that's a fricking ton of liquid metal. Look at that glob on there. You see that? Wow, what the heck? Five heat pipes. And you can see they're making use of actually a lot of the space around that fan to pull in air from the side and blow it through. Moment of truth, where's the caliper? Oh, here they are. What's the size of the six nanometer full-sized? 260 millimeters squared. Okay. Okay, we are 21.95 by 12.03. 260. Okay, it's the same die then, meaning that it having the exact same power measurements makes a ton of sense because functionally this is the same PlayStation 5 refresh, but in a much smaller. And I mean, I see a lot of people kind of saying they don't like the look. And in my opinion, better looking chassis. I'm kind of shocked actually. Historically, every other PlayStation Slim model came with a node shrink and a power improvement. PS2, for example, went from 200 nanometers all the way down to 90. PS3 went from 90 to 45. And PS4 went from 28 nanometer to 16 nanometer. Looks like with this, we get nothing other than everything we talked about already, which again, I see a lot of people kind of hating on it, but a bit more storage, no louder, it's smaller, extra USB-C. I like it. Crap. I'm gonna take so much hate. Please, fan boys, leave me alone. dbrand is already hard at work on their Darkplates 4.0, which are designed to make the covers for your PS5 Slim less tacky. I forgot about the glossiness actually. What I was saying, I like everything else about it other than that. Presumably they'll have a bunch of colors and probably a better air intake and all that good stuff that we've come to expect from dbrand's Darkplates, but they're not out yet. So you guys are presumably gonna be sent to a page that prompts you to sign up for a notification once they're available. Thanks to dbrand for getting our hands on this very, very early. I know that dbrand has deep ties with Sony that enable them to get early access to their hardware. Just kidding, none of that is true. Delete me. Your personal info is being shared online without your consent by data broker companies that apparently don't care that we live in a society with rules on decency. Thankfully, Delete Me will help you find hundreds of online profiles sharing that personal information which could be used by scammers to hit you with a barrage of robocalls and spam emails. And in more extreme cases, it could even lead to identity theft, fraud and embarrassment on social media. Removing all of this information yourself would be a huge task that could take hours but Delete Me's team of experts and specialized software can do the job in minutes. Plus Delete Me continues scanning and eliminating your info from across the web all year long. On average, Delete Me finds and removes over 2000 pieces of data for a customer in their first two years. So if you wanna get your personal info removed from search results on the web, go to joindeleteme.com slash LinusTechTips and use code LTT for 20% off. And thanks to you guys for watching. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our review of the PSVR2. It really is an outstanding headset and at least for now, only works on the PlayStation 5.
Pretty nifty video. I would have liked to see more of the labs doing their thing, but still pretty good.
Hmmm dbrand supplying this.. dbrand had issues with Sony. This might be a payback from dbrand.
Am I tripping or is there a grease on the lens of the top-down camera?