Ben Heck's PS4 Pro Teardown

Like the Xbox One S it has a wireless module outside the main RF Cage but in this case they have 3 antennas on them. Unlike the Xbox One wireless isn’t a separate module it’s just an exposed module on the main board. The Pro4 is notable for its lack of 4K blue ray support and initially appears to be the same system as the original but with a bigger APU (accelerated processing unit).

A large copper plane is used for the heat sink as opposed to the steel on the PS4 Slim. The top of the unit looks like its power supply, heat sink, and blue ray drive. There’s twice as much power regulation as the PS4 Slim. There’s a built in speaker beeper like the Xbox One.

Ben gives his theory on why dies shrinks every time they do a new revision of a console. After getting the die of the PS4 Pro cleaned up he compares it with the Die of the PS4 Slim. There’s more surface area to pull heat from the chip. The biggest difference between the motherboards of the two systems is that they have a lot more power regulation going on and a larger die that sinks more heat in.

The heat sink of the new system is about 30% bigger than the old one. It's longer and a little bit thicker. There’s three heat pipes coming out of a copper core and those heat pipes are going directly to the top of the fins of the heat sink. There’s quite a bit more heat dissipation going on with this unit.

Ben compares the power supply of the PS4 Pro with the one on the Slim. There’s a pretty big jump in power consumption on the new system. The 12 Volt rail on the new power supply is 23.5 amps. That is nearly twice as much as the Xbox One S.

Finally, Ben compares the Blue Ray Drive of both systems. In comparing both drivese, Ben gets an answer to why there’s no 4K support on the PlayStation 4. After lamenting the lack of 4 K blue ray support on the PS4, as compared to Xbox One S, he opines that 4K is a gimmick. After all a lot of big budget movies are still mastered at 2K, and many digital theater projections are just 4 K as well.

[Kilo]

HGST is Hitachi, and is owned by Western Digital. I've heard that their drives are pretty solid.

[segaprophet]

HGST = Hitachi Global Storage Technology

[popcornuk]

The reason the die is bigger is down to the greater number of AMD GCN cores required to drive 4K or 2K up-scaled output. It's not just bigger for heat dissipation. The CPU part of the die is the same but it's been given a boost in clock speed along with a small increase to the GCN cores. Also the the pro has 1GB of DDR3 RAM added for background tasks, freeing up more of the 8GB GDDR5 RAM.

[tboHammu]

Just FYI, HGST stands for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and it's nowadays owned by Western Digital.

[Wepistx]

Really like your commentary you pull no punches explaining the differences between systems

[ZeusWeus]

Disc based media is far from obsolete... I know plenty of people who like actually having what they bought

[Marttyy]

teardown after teardown...but yet no ps4, x1s, ps4pro laptop :(

[Salty.Peasants]

physical media is still very much relevant. streaming is used for convience, but physical is still the go to for people with kick-ass audio systems, or the newest TV's. 4k adoption rate is over twice as high as conventional full HD sets. The only logical way to take advantage and see the full benefits of those 4k sets will be physical media.

[jkrtkdq]

HGST mostly makes HDDs for servers and NAS stations. They're extremely reliable.

[cbergeron]

thank you ben hack and your crew for making these kind of videos.

[carebox]

"Why are you buying the more powerful console?". You should have unleashed a backhand of incredible fury.

[DaSamNudge]

the "mounting hole" is for the vertical stand.

[JamesDeal]

Wow! Subbed! This was a really well written and produced show! Extremely informative while staying entertaining is not something that's easy to do anymore.

[bugzkilla]

The mounting hole is for the stand that attaches to the side so it can stand up.

[TonyFleetwood]

there really are box engineers! my friend tom used to be a packing engineer for NASA!

[cbergeron]

this was a huge blow to my heart, i really loved sony gaming products. i had a every playstation and loved them all. but the ps4 pro, i mine aswell stick to my regular ps4 and wait to see what the next console will offer.i think i will be buying a xbox one s for the reason that i can play 4k discs. yes we are buying them.

[wojiaobill]

It's not the size of your die that counts, it's how you use it

[Specter]

Great video as always. All you needed was a "BUM BUM BUM" sound bit at the end when you found out the optical drives are the same. Happy Holidays all!

[robhimself]

my brother is legitimately a packaging designer. he designed boxes and packaging for all sorts of companies.

[patrikforsman]

HGST is a famous brand of hard drive they were called Hitachi before they changed names on the storage devices