The next-generation of consoles will come with some seriously powerful hardware which will need to be cooled down properly to avoid your $500 console from melting. The Xbox Series X reportedly runs cooler than the Xbox One, making it a piece of fantastic engineering. The PlayStation 5, on the other hand, doesn’t have enough real-world documented tests from outfits to make a comparison but coming from the teardown, it sports a humongous fan and heatsink that could cool the system down.

In a recent 4Gamer.net inteview with PlayStation’s Yasuhiro Otori (translated by ResetEra user orzkare), it was revealed that the cooling fan of the PlayStation 5 can be adjusted via updates to the firmware.

The interview is quite lengthy, but you can see the specific section where it talks about the fan down below:

In addition to the temperature sensor inside the APU, PS5 has three temperature sensors on the main board to control the fan speed based on the internal temperature of the APU and the highest temperature of the three temperature sensors.
It is interesting to note that these fan control parameters will also be updated via online updates.

Otori: Various games will be released in the future, and data on the APU’s behavior in each game will be collected. We have a plan to optimize the fan control based on this data.

The PS5’s thermal design, including the speed of the air-cooled fans, is said to have a generous margin of safety. If a game is under heavy load for a long period of time, they can increase the fan speed to enhance cooling performance, even at the expense of quietness. This is an interesting story.

This is quite interesting since the fan can effectively run faster or slower depending on the games or conditions at hand, which will be based on the data collected by the PS5. It might run faster in some cases at the expense of a little noise, but at least it will properly cool the system when it needs to the most.

Right now, the first impressions of the PlayStation 5 by Japanese YouTubers have had positive feedback, stating that it was cool and quiet during their time with it so it seems that the main problem from the PS3 and PS4 have been fixed.