There’s a revised PS5 that’s lighter and more power efficient

polygon.com:

Last week, Sony quietly launched a revised model of the PlayStation 5 in Australia. Reports suggested the new model, which bears a 1200 model number, was more lightweight — like its predecessor, the 1100, which appeared last year.

Now, YouTuber Austin Evans has obtained a 1200-model PS5 (Digital Edition), put it through some initial tests, and performed a teardown. It was Evans whose initial report on the 1100 suggested its cooling assembly might perform worse than the 1200, leading to fears the model was a downgrade — which proved to be unfounded.

However, Evans’ findings on the 1200 model are significant. It’s around half a pound lighter than the 1100, and a full pound lighter than the launch model — a noticeable change. The teardown shows substantially revised and shrunk internals, with a smaller motherboard and heatsink, and a new heat pipe. In terms of noise and heat output, the 1200 is very similar to the earlier models.

The headline, however, is that the new PS5 appears to draw substantially less power. In a simple gameplay test (running a scene from Astro’s Playroom), Evans found the 1200 model drew 20-30 W less than the older models of PS5. If this is borne out in more extensive testing, it would mean a non-trivial reduction in the power cost of playing games on a PS5 of between 10% and 20% — good news for the planet, and for players’ energy bills.

Evans says the revised PS5 is “almost certainly” cheaper for Sony to produce. It’s normal for electronics manufacturers to find efficiencies and cost savings as they refine their products, but these normally go hand-in-hand with price reductions for consumers. Sony, however, recently raised the price of the PS5 in territories outside the U.S.