Sony’s Playstation 4 is selling like hotcakes on a cold winter’s day, with the console racking up over 2.1 million units sold within its first week on the market. Despite a few hardware issues for a minority of buyers, it looks like Sony’s hardware has avoided any hiccups in manufacturing or in the thermal performance of the console.<\/p>\n
But how does the PS4 exhaust heat with the limited amount of space Sony has to work with in comparison to the Xbox One?<\/p>\n
One PS4 owner with a thermal imaging camera decided to see for himself and the results are interesting and rather cool (pun intended).<\/p>\n
The thermal images show that the console heats up quite a bit at its core where the APU and system memory is located, but stays well under the 50\u00b0 Celsius mark. The part of the chassis where the hard drive is located has little exposure to excess heat, despite a giant aluminium heatsink running through the middle of the console to help with heat distribution.<\/p>\n
With the way the PS4 was designed, cool air is drawn in through the front of the console, run through the heatsink and almost immediately exhausted through the rear. As the pictures show, running the console vertically is the best option should you want to keep it cool at all times. Lying it flat on a desk appears to increase the amount of heat that needs to be exhausted, typically by about 10\u00b0 Celsius.<\/p>\n\n\t\t