The PlayStation 5 is now more than five years old, and consoles from those first couple of production years are well out of warranty and starting to show their age. One complaint comes up more than any other: heat. The fan that used to whisper now sounds like it’s preparing for take-off, games stutter or crash, and in the worst cases the console shuts itself down mid-session with a warning that it’s too hot. Sometimes it won’t come back on at all.

Some of this is ordinary wear and tear, the same dust and dried-out thermal interface problems that affect every games console and laptop ever made. But the PS5 has one design quirk all of its own, involving the liquid metal Sony used to cool its main chip, and it’s worth understanding because it changes how you should look after the machine.

The PS5 runs hot by design

First, some reassurance. A warm PS5 is normal. The console packs a powerful AMD chip (the APU, which combines the processor and graphics into one) into a fairly compact case, and modern games push it hard. Warm air from the vents and a fan you can hear during a demanding game are not faults.

Genuine overheating looks different. Watch for the fan roaring at full speed during menus or light games, hot air that smells faintly of burning dust, games crashing or freezing, sudden shutdowns, or the on-screen message telling you the PS5 is too hot and needs to close. If any of that sounds familiar, something inside needs attention, and the sooner you deal with it the better, because sustained heat shortens the life of every component on the board.

The usual suspect: dust

The most common cause of an overheating PS5 is the least exciting one. The console pulls air in through vents along its sides, and along with the air comes dust, pet hair and, in plenty of homes, a surprising amount of carpet fluff. Over a few years this builds up on the fan blades and, more importantly, clogs the fins of the heatsink, the big metal radiator that carries heat away from the chip. Once those fins are blocked, the fan can spin as fast as it likes but the heat has nowhere to go.

Sony actually designed the PS5 with two dust catcher ports you can reach by removing the side panels, and hoovering those out is a reasonable bit of DIY maintenance. But the dust that really matters, the stuff packed into the heatsink itself, sits much deeper in the machine and needs a proper strip-down to reach.

The liquid metal story

Here’s where the PS5 differs from almost everything else in your house. Instead of ordinary thermal paste between the chip and the heatsink, Sony used liquid metal, an alloy of gallium and indium that stays liquid at room temperature. It conducts heat far better than paste, which is how the PS5 keeps such a powerful chip cool in such a tight space. Clever engineering, genuinely.

The catch is that liquid metal is exactly what it sounds like: a liquid. It’s held in place by a foam barrier sealed around the chip, and it’s also electrically conductive, which means that if it ever escapes and touches other components, it can short them out and kill the console stone dead.

Around late 2022, console repair technicians began reporting exactly that. A UK repair YouTuber known as TheCod3r opened up a dead PS5 and found liquid metal had escaped its enclosure and shorted contacts on the lower edge of the APU. French repair shops reported similar finds, with liquid metal visibly pooled towards the bottom of the chip on consoles that had spent their lives stood upright. The pattern in these cases pointed the same way: gravity. Keep the console vertical for long enough and the liquid metal can slowly migrate downwards, thinning out at the top of the chip and pooling at the bottom. TechSpot covered the original findings here: https://www.techspot.com/news/97192-mounting-ps5-vertically-might-lead-catastrophic-failure-liquid.html

Two things can then happen. The milder outcome is that the top portion of the chip loses good thermal contact, so the console starts running hotter, the fan works harder, and performance suffers. The nasty outcome is the pooled metal breaching the seal and reaching the board, at which point you’re looking at a short circuit and, potentially, a console that will never switch on again.

How worried should you be?

Honestly? Concerned enough to take precautions, not concerned enough to panic. This deserves saying clearly because the internet coverage got a bit hysterical at the time.

Sony has never acknowledged a fault, and the console is officially designed to work in both orientations. Some technicians argue the failures mainly involve consoles where the seal was already compromised, whether by a manufacturing defect or by a previous opening of the console. Millions of PS5s have stood vertically since 2020 with no trouble at all. What we can say from the repair bench is that the documented failures overwhelmingly involve vertically stored consoles, that pooling towards one edge of the chip is a real and repeatedly observed phenomenon, and that later hardware revisions, including the Slim and the Pro, still use liquid metal, so the same physics applies. Sony did add extra grooves to the APU housing in newer revisions, which most people read as a quiet acknowledgement that containing the liquid metal needed more thought.

Sensible precautions

The cheapest fix in this whole article costs nothing: lay the console flat. Horizontal orientation lets the liquid metal sit evenly across the whole face of the chip, with gravity working for you rather than against you. If your setup absolutely demands vertical, it’s not a death sentence, but flat is the lower risk option, especially for launch-era consoles.

Beyond that, the advice is standard good housekeeping. Give the console breathing room, at least 10cm of clear space around the vents, and never shut it in a cupboard while it’s running. Keep it off carpet, which both blocks airflow and feeds it fluff. Hoover the vents and dust ports every few months. And don’t ignore a fan that has become noticeably louder over time; that’s the console telling you it’s struggling.

One more thing: if your console is out of warranty, resist the temptation to open it up and repaste it yourself after watching a video. Liquid metal is unforgiving stuff. One stray drop on the board, or a damaged seal reassembled imperfectly, turns a maintenance job into a dead console. This is one of the few console repairs where the DIY risk genuinely outweighs the saving. iFixit’s guide gives you a good idea of what’s involved if you’re curious: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Apply+Liquid+Metal+in+a+PlayStation+5/170479

How it gets sorted

The good news is that all of this is fixable, and usually for far less than replacing the console. A proper service involves a full strip-down, deep cleaning of the fan and heatsink fins, inspection of the APU area for any signs of liquid metal migration or oxidation, and then cleaning off and reapplying fresh liquid metal with the barrier seal properly restored before reassembly. On a console that’s been running hot, the difference afterwards is usually dramatic: quieter fan, cooler exhaust, no more crashes.

Even where liquid metal has already leaked, all is not necessarily lost. Depending on where it ended up, careful cleaning and board-level repair work can sometimes bring a dead console back, though the earlier it’s caught the better the odds.

If your PS5 is roaring, crashing, shutting down or refusing to start, and you’re in the Aberdeen area, we do exactly this work at our walk-in service centre, no appointment needed, with fixed prices and a six month warranty on repairs. Details are on our PlayStation repair page: https://www.techrescueonline.co.uk/playstation-ps4-ps5-console-repair-aberdeen/

And in the meantime, if your console is standing to attention next to the telly, consider letting it lie down. It’s earned the rest.