PlayStation 3 Uses Heat Pipe Cooling
June 16th, 2006 by Darren Stevens in Articles, Hardware, PlayStation 3, Technology
In an interview with Japanese site PC Impress Watch, Sony’s Ken Kutaragi said that because of the power of the Cell processor and the RSX graphics chip, PlayStation 3 will use a custom cooling solution, with heat pipes. Heat pipes conduct the heat much faster than conventional cooling, and are commonly used to cool high-end PCs. Kutaragi also said that:
“We’re spending a lot on heat and electromagnetic interference (management). The power supply could almost be sold separately.”
Confirming the rumors that the PS3 will need a large power supply, presumably bigger than the ones found in modern PCs.
How heat pipes work (Wikipedia).
Tags: Articles, Hardware, PlayStation 3, Technology
June 18th, 2006 at 10:14 am
heatpipes hah, who cares. I have some realy good ones on both my graphics cards (SLI) and I think fans are much better. They’ll try and hype any little thing up. pathetic. And they’re commonly used by people who want SILENT pcs not realy high end gaming pcs.
June 18th, 2006 at 10:35 am
this could be just overkill in cooling but then again if u play this machine for a few hours it wont shut down like to 360…
June 18th, 2006 at 10:52 am
Very interesting…. more proof you are paying for real next generation material should you choose Sony.
June 18th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Marc, Heat pipes arent used by people who want silent PCs, get your facts right before you make an idiot of yourself, heat pipes are used to dispurse heat in a small area where there isnt room for a fan right on the chip its self.
The small copper section in the image above sits on the processor or RSX chip, then the grill at the back has a fan attached to it, the heat from the processor heats the liquid in the pipes and the fan cools the pipes.
Heat pipes arent new, i have had them for over 2 years in my shuttle case and i have never had a problem with heat so i guess they work pritty well.
June 18th, 2006 at 11:15 am
Duh Heatpipes are not all that revolutionary
anyone had an xbox360 apart yet??
they have heatpipes too.
sony is hating it from what i have read as their memory is having problems with the cel processors
June 18th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Like others said heat pipes are new and sony will do anything to have hype. If they want next gen…Please Please! use liquid cooling. If anyone has used it will know indeed they are better and more efficint (sp?) when it comes to cooling and sound reduction.
Also i might want to add to all the ps3 fan boys, you know there selling the ps3 in Uk for like 5xx (there currency) which is somewhere around 1000..yes..1000 USD. dont belive me? here
http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/16436/PS3_On_Sale_For_1000
Really it is supposed to be around 800USD (who know what that is in UK) but honestly it isnt goign to get any cheaper for us residence. and once PS3 rolls around hm..i wonder what two things are gonna happen…halo 3 and lower of price from xbox360 which ulitmatly means more sells from microsft. not to diss you fan boys…there isnt that much of a differnce between the two boxes…maybe expect for games. if you are a hardcore gammer..i would go with computers cuase they are way better
June 18th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
To Bubba - The 360 uses heatsinks… Not heatpipes
June 20th, 2006 at 4:38 am
wow…this is getting a little too much just for a video game system. this is not like we are marines or something training for a life or death situation. it just makes the system more expensive and for me less desirable.
June 26th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
Andrew - Here is a link to an Anandtech article that contains a photo of the Xbox 360’s heat sink, which clearly sports heat pipes. The PS3 making use of heat pipes is not news in any way.
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2610&p=7
June 26th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
To Bubba: Get y’r facts straight. There is NO problem with the memory & the cell. You’re talking about the cell reading from the rsx chip. Something that’s allmost never used. Why read from the graphis chip?
June 26th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
hah. Heatpipes.
Sure, they work well, but without proper airflow, they’re useless, all they do is allow heat to build up unless you have a good number of well-placed fans moving the air over the heatpipe “output” and outside of the case.
To Tijger: Even if you are correct, the stupidly slow read rate of will cripple the rest of the system, as even though the amount of data that is required to be read from the graphics chip is comparatively small, the PS3’s is still waaaay too slow to do it. That, and the Cell’s speed is slowly dropping and dropping as sony realise cell really is an inferior piece of technology that is quite useless for real processing beyond pure number-crunching (and even that is pretty poor with the current speeds) that just can’t cut it.
June 26th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
“custom cooling solution?” Isn’t the WHOLE system customized?
June 27th, 2006 at 12:04 am
Thats good to know! Thanks for the post
June 27th, 2006 at 12:53 am
look how can yaw judge the ps3 if it aint out yet and dont u think sony pays top dollar to the people who make the ps3 they would never let something like speed get in the way and as of now 360 has the same type of speed so i guess its slow too
June 27th, 2006 at 2:39 am
This is just marketing to make you pay $, show me a real console and real games, then we talk …
June 27th, 2006 at 10:14 am
wow seeing as Sony was not hyping this but as this piece of information came up during an interview which only about 3 lines of the interview was in this summary.
you guys are true MS/wii fanboys
Ken was not bragging you’re not paying more for it
it’s a tried and proven piece technology and yet you bash Ken like he said it’s the best thing since sliced bread I’ve actually seen and read the whole interview this is a small part of it
go play your cheap system and be happy
June 27th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
To Kyle: If you are going to try and scare people about the UK price of the PS3, you really should get your facts straight. In fact, you could just read the article and follow the links in it. The PS3 mentioned there is in fact a bundle with 3 games for £550.
The PS3 costs £425, which means the 3 games cost an average of £42 each. All these include taxes.
How much would you pay in the US? My understanding is that you would pay $600, plus 3x$70 for the games, making a grand total of $810. On top of this I understand you have to pay sales taxes separately … Making it about $900.
No product pricing ever translates using the exchange rate from US to UK, but this is actually not that far off once everything is included.
June 27th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
I’ve had a 360 for quite a while and it has never “shut down after a few hours”. Maybe if people didn’t put it in a cabinet behind glass it wouldn’t overheat. It needs ventilation and obviously so will this thing.
June 27th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
heatpipes ! its used everywhere…machinaries, aircon compressors…etc…
June 28th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Kyle i dont know if your getting some -50% discount on your stuff or something but xbox is _NOT_ cheaper than ps3. Only idiot says its cheaper because they just choose the core pack and look at the small price. but that pack does not even come close to ps3. And if you buy the premium pack + XBL for 5years + wificonnector + batterypacks + HDdvd + bigger HDD your way over the ps3 price. I dont know if you just coudnt count that far or something but do get your facts right before you come here whining about ps3 price.
And yes pc is the most powerfull system from those, but its the most expensive one too. And if you want to keep on playing pcgames well without any problems you need to keep on buying new parts lot more often than new consoles.
And finally if your a true player you will buy all the systems because that allows you to play everygame out there not just part of them
August 18th, 2006 at 3:47 am
Cajunspirit
‘Very interesting…. more proof you are paying for real next generation material should you choose Sony’
- Well no Because if you have read the articles and reports 360 are getting watercoolers that you can buy for a few hundred Pound, yeah you will have to fit it yourself and they dont give you instuctions but a person with some experience should have it working like a jelly tot.
MMMM..
‘this could be just overkill in cooling but then again if u play this machine for a few hours it wont shut down like to 360…’
First of all 360 dont just shut down well mine didnt and the total of consoles sent back represented around 1% and thats all the people who stand the console upright so the all is not escaping and sending the air back up into the system causing it to conbust dead and thats there own fault for 360 being upright and most of them moan and they have it on a thick carpet,anyone who knows about electronics no really anyone should grasp that you cant treat equiptment like that well i suppose 8 year old sony fanboys would disagree with me there the fact being they dont know alot, just trying to look good with their fancy number crunching next time stick to alphabet spaghetti, this all comes down to the new 360 watercooler again, either have the upgraded 360 cpu and a nyko cooler and plenty of space if your weary of it combusting because youve had it against the carpet to long or just get a watercooler with plenty of space should do it, i got mine on xmas day played it day after day with plenty of space laid down and its not seriously gave up on me yet, yeah theres been a few crashes but you get that with most consoles and expiecally 360 being as powerful as it is its not bomb proof or perfect, neither is anything.
sorry if i have taken my time and written quite alot hope y’all agree with what i say if i dont return to this thread then you can IM me on:
i_love_stuff123@hotmail.com
i love to hear from you and thanks
March 28th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
PS3 is much better then any machine out there. I can’t wait to see what sony has in 5 years from now. 360 is a poorly put togather machine and the graphics are the nasty. later pussys
PS3FanBoy
March 28th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
At least Nick admits he is a PS3 Fanboy … that pretty much says it all. Yeah Gears of War and GRAW/GRAW2 and Oblivion all have nasty graphics … yeah nobody liked those games and none of them won any awards. This guy is right everyone … MS might as well stop making consoles now and scrap all plans to sell the new Elite. Sony wins in a landslide.
November 21st, 2007 at 7:23 am
it isn’t a fashion!!!
heat pipes are 10 times more efficients than pure copper fins in carring away heat… they don’t need any pump or electricity source… in the future the use of these devices is unavoidable because of the downsizing of dimension and the growing of watts!!!
December 20th, 2007 at 12:50 am
indeed arz, heatpipes are very efficient in moving heat away from the source and its closer to 30x copper depending on the type and construction
as for water cooling, it is very similar in that it simply moves heat from one place to another, you then must dissipate that heat out into the air either through passive heatsinks or with fans.
the whole point of heatpipes is to move the heat away from the cpu (in this case) to a place near the edge of the case where it can be efficiently transfered to the air and are primarily used due to space confines as there is not enough room to cool the cpu at the source.
also, while water cooling is good and all, for use in a console the cooling system must be completely sealed and not leak due to it being upside down or something, also it needs a pump, hosing, coolant and a heatsink to dissipate the heat anyway. its just not economically viable to put water cooling in a console nor is it needed.
heatpipes do the same job just as well without the need for power and remove all the fiddlyness of water cooling, they have no moving parts and should last indefinitely.
reguardless of your cooling system, you still need to get the heat out of the unit and into the air so you will still need large surface area passive or fan assisted heat sinks anyway, such as the many finned creation in the pic up top ^^^^.
i like 360’s, if only for halo. but still have to say that the ps3 is a better system. i dont care what you say it is what it is, it has better stats and a better design. the cpu is a 7 core beast and can process coordinate data from satellites and display a fully controllable 3d map of anywhere on the earth Real Time.
and thats just the cpu. unfortunately the 360 came out before these cores where available en mass for production so instead have a 3 core unit? but since the ps3 came out like 6 month later they had access to better technologies. and in another yr or so microsoft will probably bring out a new console and on it goes its the way it works. its just that sony had better hardware available to them at the time.
in all seriousness, the ps3 isnt even ,Close, to breaking a sweat running even the best games on it, its not the speed that matters, its the architecture that will determine the performance.
but now this discussion is getting a long way off the topic of heat pipes and is closer to turning into a ‘my fav console is better than urs’ battle between whingy people. really who cares? if its got the games you like and it runs them ok then good enough. the last console i bought was a 64
. i just use pcs now, more flexible even if they do cost a heck of a load more. but ill see what comes out in the next 8 months.