Hardware PS4 teardown on wired.

[FAST6191]

I lack the time to do a proper USN/news article so I will stick it here instead
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/ps4-gallery/#slideid-86211
Thanks to Thug on IRC for pointing me towards that.

Some nice pictures, I would like higher res but I can not have everything it seems.

The battery being possibly hard to replace (though modern batteries are not bad) and the CPU/APU thing being in the middle of a board does not seem ideal (though I have no idea how good the underside support is) and by the sounds of things they have some mechanical engineers doing what they do best for this, to say nothing of the fact that nobody wants to revisit YLOD/RROD. To that end I am far more likely to question any lasers in the optical drive at this point in time as far as reliability goes.
It looks like a can around the device rather than a socket which could be interesting, I wonder if it is just due diligence or they actually had problems.

 

[Deleted member 473940]

Interesting

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

I like the main board looks very clean and simple.

Yeah probably the only components that might have reliability issues would be the laser and possibly the GDDR5 (but the RAM thing I doubt, I have an old Radeon 4870 with 1GB of GDDR5 and it's once of those IceQ models that comes factory overclocked and it still is chugging along just fine.)

 

[trumpet-205]

Somewhat sad to see they still use blower fan, but other than that it looks very clean and simple. Design looks like a PS3 Slim motherboard, except it is single chip now.

 

[Foxi4]

Note the heatpipes connecting the radiator and the heatspreader. Clearly a lot of thought went into the "cooling" part of the design.

 

[migles]

the pictures are bad... but its what we got

 

[MelodieOctavia]

Note the heatpipes connecting the radiator and the heatspreader. Clearly a lot of thought went into the "cooling" part of the design.

Sony has been in the console game since 1994, and the electronics industry even before that. It makes sense that they know how to design hardware, whereas when the 360 came out, Microsoft was still a bit wet behind the ears, only having made the Xbox previously.

 

[Foxi4]

Sony has been in the console game since 1994, and the electronics industry even before that. It makes sense that they know how to design hardware, whereas when the 360 came out, Microsoft was still a bit wet behind the ears, only having made the Xbox previously.

I think it's mostly the experiences they had with the PS3's poor cooling that lead to this design choice more than anything else - they don't want another YLOD situation to happen this time around.

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

Note the heatpipes connecting the radiator and the heatspreader. Clearly a lot of thought went into the "cooling" part of the design.

I also noticed that there is no copper in it

Probably not a problem but the PC enthusiast in me says it needs some copper to drop the temps a bit more. lol

 

[Foxi4]

I also noticed that there is no copper in it

Probably not a problem but the PC enthusiast in me says it needs some copper to drop the temps a bit more. lol

It does, but it also inflates the price. In the context of an APU that's a "mobile" designs on steroids, I doubt it'll need that much cooling.

 

[MelodieOctavia]

I think it's mostly the experiences they had with the PS3's poor cooling that lead to this design choice more than anything else - they don't want another YLOD situation to happen this time around.

YLOD was still pretty isolated compared to RROD though, and was fixed in later iterations of the PS3.

 

[Foxi4]

YLOD was still pretty isolated compared to RROD though, and was fixed in later iterations of the PS3.

Oh, very true, but it was still a stigma lingering on the PS3 brand like a fart trapped in denim pants.

 

[trumpet-205]

I think it's mostly the experiences they had with the PS3's poor cooling that lead to this design choice more than anything else - they don't want another YLOD situation to happen this time around.

Cooling design on PS3 FAT is actually pretty good (even better than Slim, which has very little ventilation hole).

Problem is poor ball soldering back then (combined with very inefficient PSU). It took a while for Sony to polished its soldering procedure.

 

[MelodieOctavia]

Oh, very true, but it was still a stigma lingering on the PS3 brand like a fart trapped in denim pants.

Very true, and it would have been much more of a PR problem if Microsoft hadn't royally screwed the pooch on their console design.

 

[BORTZ]

Almost looks minimalistic. Well lets home there arent major flaws like the last generation.