Teardowns of the PlayStation 5 have revealed that there has been a "fan lottery" of sorts: there are two different types of fan that can be installed in the console, and some gamers might have gotten the noisier ones whereas reviewers might have received the quietest ones.
These are big claims, so let's roll it back. A reporter for Les Numériques, an outlet that focuses on the performance of all kinds of electronics, found that the digital edition of the PS5 that he ordered for his personal use was a lot louder than the digital edition of the PS5 that he had received for review purposes. How odd. Other users had also heard a high-pitched "coil whine" when playing games like Astro's Playroom, Demon's Souls, and God of War, evidencing that the souped-up specs of the console weren't utterly infallible.
For the reporter, the logical next step was to take apart the consoles, to see if there were differences between them. They uncovered the fact that there are two types of cooling fan that are present in the PlayStation 5. The differences aren't minor, either. I'm not an engineer or a mechanic or anything like that, but I can see how these two fans would operate differently under the panels of the console. The "quiet" fan doesn't have its blades connect to the central axis, whereas the "noisy" fan does have its blades connecting and in a tighter spiral. The central axis is also smaller, though the overall size of the fans are near enough the same.
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Hang on. Looking at these two fans, and then comparing them with the fan in the official PS5 teardown video published by Sony, there might even be a third type. This one's blades look thinner than those of either of the other fans, and its central circle is definitely different. What's going on? Why would Sony go to the trouble of making three types of cooling fan for the PlayStation 5?
My own theory is that the need for new fans was due to manufacturing shortages owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. SIE CEO Jim Ryan has admitted that production of the PlayStation 5 was impacted in multiple ways as the coronavirus crisis worsened. "Of all the things that I've learned this year, one is that I wouldn't plan on doing another big console launch in the midst of a global pandemic, and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody else," he said in a recent interview.
"It's been difficult, it's been challenging from the production side, not being able to get anybody into the factories in Asia... Before we started production, we had to do all the manufacturing preparation by camera remotely," he explained. Perhaps, in the face of unexpected issues from factories, Sony permitted three different fans be made by three different suppliers in order to guarantee that consoles would be on the shelves by November. The only fishy thing about this is whether Sony consciously chose to send units with quieter fans to reviewers, while the "fan lottery" only applied to consumers.
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Sony is yet to acknowledge the report, so we'll hang fire until we get an official confirmation of these three different fans.
Featured Image Credit: SonyTopics: PlayStation 5, News