Take another look inside the PlayStation 5 with iFixit’s new teardown

iFixit has released its teardown of the PlayStation 5 and its DualSense controller, and it goes into more detail than the one Sony did earlier this year. The device repair company found that the console has a ton of screws holding it in place and that there is a strange problem when replacing the optical drive.

Photo: Creative Electron (via iFixit)

It turns out that the optical drive is software locked on the motherboard. Physical swapping is apparently a piece of cake, but any replacement you put in won’t read the discs, so if your optical drive fails, you’ll send it to Sony. It’s a bummer, especially to me – I’ve had bad luck with the PlayStation optical drives, and the only drive I haven’t had to replace is my PS4 (which was only a few years old when I sold it).

Don’t worry about diskless digital edition owners though, and as we’ve seen above, adding an additional SSD will be easy when the console finally supports it – it just involves unhooking a single side panel and removing one screw.

Photo: iFixit

The teardown also provides an inside look at the power supply (above), which Sony didn’t show us before. As someone who has dabbled in PC gaming, I am always amazed when he reminds me that the PS5 only has a 350W power supply (and uses only 200 of those watts under load!)

Photo: iFixit

As for the DualSense controller, iFixit found that its battery is relatively easy to replace, which is good considering that it still uses internal Li-ion that will degrade over time. It is also massive at 5.7 watt-hours, compared to the 3.7 Wh package in the DualShock 4. Those adaptive triggers and haptic feedback motors must be thirsty. We also take another look at the impressive drive screw that powers those adaptive triggers.

What I don’t see is an easy way to unhook the LEDs surrounding the DualSense touchpad. This may be a niche thing to do, but I absolutely hated the light on the DualShock 4, and while the new one isn’t all that annoying, I still wish Sony would let you turn it off or let screwdriver gamers unhook it without so much. scandal.

You can head over to the iFixit teardown page to see many more photos. And if you’d like to get an idea of ​​what it would be like to disassemble the devices (without risking what is now effectively a $ 1,000 console), the company has provided videos of the teardowns that you can watch below.