According to the reports, a fatal design flaw doesn’t prevent gravity from displacing the liquid metal used to cool the APU (the Accelerated Processing Unit from AMD). Eventually, this leads to spillage that, in the worst-case scenario, can short circuit the entire console. The news came to light after Twitter user 68Logic, a hardware shop owner from France, took to the social media platform to share the problem he has seen in consoles from multiple clients. He claims that in most cases, the liquid metal used to cool the APU (the Accelerated Processing Unit from AMD) will be pressed too tightly together for gravity to be a problem. Most of the 30 million PS5 owners will probably never face this issue, but if a user somehow damages the seal or if it’s moved, the metal can reportedly become uneven or even spill in the future. Not only would this immediately affect the efficiency of the cooling system that may result in noisy fans trying to compensate and unexpected shutdowns as the console overheats, but it could also be a death sentence.
— Consoles System (@68Logic) January 4, 2023 Another French expert, Ben Montana, has been reporting the same issue for months, seeing multiple examples of the same malfunction in his own repair shop. He says the likelihood of damage is increased the longer the console is kept vertical and the liquid metal could end up bricking the entire console. A website called Wololo theorizes that the issue could be more prevalent among physical edition variants, where the vibrations of the Blu-ray drive could be making the issue even worse. YouTuber TheCod3r has been reporting the same issue for quite some time as well and claims that the problem has been evenly reported in all models, even in an unopened PlayStation 5 that was stored vertically for a long time. Users are understandably upset regardless of if they store their PlayStation 5 horizontally or vertically. Apart from being expensive and hard to get, nobody wants to regret buying a PS5 over the Xbox Series X because of a design flaw. Considering that the PlayStation 6 isn’t coming any time soon, Sony might have no choice but to address this issue as soon as possible. Who knows? The long-rumored new PS5 might be more horizontally-oriented to prevent this problem from happening in future variants.
