Sony has decided to use liquid metal on PlayStation 5 to reduce the cost of the cooling system. The Vice President of the Mechanical Design Department of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Yasuhiro Ootori, explained that although an isolated liquid metal terminal interface material (TIM) is more expensive, it offers enough efficiency to allow Sony to use cheaper components in other parts of the hardware.
Yasuhiro Ootori said: “The main reason is the cost. The standard for thermal design is to spend money close to the heat source. As an analogy to general thermal design, let's assume you have a system cooling structure that costs 10 yen for a TIM and 1000 yen for a heat sink. If you switch to a 100 yen TIM here, you can get the same cooling effect even if you use a 500 yen heatsink. In other words, the total cost can be reduced. After overcoming the difficulties in handling it and adapting it to the production process, we were able to use liquid metal on PlayStation 5, obtaining the effect we wanted ».
