A PS5 came in from Crail on a Saturday in October, booked in for an overheating service. Within a few hours it was open on the bench, and the fan alone was enough to make you wince. Every blade had a thick, furry coat of grey-brown dust running along it.
Coated like that, a fan can’t shift anywhere near as much air as a clean one, however fast it spins. Consoles pull in whatever’s floating about the room, so dust, fluff and pet hair all find their way in sooner or later. The white side panels were a surprise of a different kind. Both had brown staining across the inside, darkest round the edges. That’s the side nobody sees unless the console gets opened up.
With the fan lifted out, we could see right into the housing it sits in. The walls were lined with dust, and along the top, where the fan blows into the heatsink, the fins had vanished under a thick grey mat. Underneath there’s a metal grille, because the PS5’s fan pulls air in from both sides of the console at once. You could see the bench through it, with dust scattered across the grille too.
The heatsink is the bit that gets the heat away from the main chip. Copper heat pipes carry it into a stack of thin metal fins, and the air from the fan has to squeeze through the gaps between them to take the heat with it. The fins sit close together on purpose, because more fins means more metal for the air to pull heat from, but it also means there’s not much room for dust before the gaps start closing up. On this one the front of the fins was buried. Air struggles to get through a mat like that, and less air means a hotter chip. The console spins its fan up faster and louder to make up for it, and if even that isn’t enough, it flashes up a warning and switches off to protect itself.
An overheating service is a full strip down and clean, getting the dust out of the fan, the housing, the heatsink and the air path so the console can breathe again. This one was ready to collect on the Monday morning and went home that afternoon. It didn't need any parts, just the clean.
If your PS5 is sounding louder than it used to, or switching itself off mid-game, dust is well worth ruling out. Give it some room, keep it off the carpet and out of that cabinet under the telly, and blow the vents out now and again with a can of compressed air while it’s switched off and unplugged. If it’s already struggling, drop it in and we’ll take a look.
Need the same repair? See our full PlayStation Repair Dundee service for pricing and what's covered.
