This Vietnamese PC modder has taken it upon himself to improve the Playstation 5 with a gorgeous, and fully functioning, custom plate water-cooling solution. Not only is this a wicked pet project, and fascinating to watch the time-lapse of, but the designer actually plans to make it commercially available.
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That's right, some day water-cooled PS5's might be slipping their way into the market. He's already encouraging interested parties to get in contact on YouTube.
According to VGC, the build took creator Nhenhophach over two months, and although the results are difficult to properly measure, he explains that "based on water temperature & backplate temperature, we can gauge the performance of this system in some way."
The video notes that, fully assembled with the fan blowing air away from the radiator onto the backplate, water temps stabilised at 104°F (40°C), and and the backplate plateaued at 122°F (50°C). This is also with an ambient room temp of 78.8°F (26°C). With the fan pulling air toward the radiator those temps were a little less impressive, and took longer to stabilise.
It's no surprise consoles are starting to see some modding love, considering the power these newer consoles are packing. The Sony Playstation 5 runs on a custom combination of Zen 2 CPU cores, and an RDNA 2 GPU that's closely related to the RX 6000 graphics cards for desktop gaming setups.
Still, with the base console starting at $400 (if you can find it), this thing is likely to cost a good chunk of your paycheck. Probably more than it would cost to build your own budget gaming PC. That doesn't stop it from being totally awesome, though.
And if you plan on doing something similar to your console: beware, modding is a slippery slope. Soon you'll be hunched over at 3am bending your own custom tubing.
