PS5 Liquid Metal Replacement

Sony did something unusual with the PS5: instead of conventional thermal paste between the APU and the heatsink, it uses liquid metal. It is a far better conductor, which is how a console that powerful stays as quiet as it does when new — but it behaves differently over time. It can migrate away from the centre of the die, and it can dry to a crust, and either way the APU starts running hotter than it should.

That is what you are hearing when the fan goes from a whisper to a roar over a couple of years. The cooling system is compensating for a thermal interface that is no longer transferring heat properly. Left long enough, the console starts throttling to protect itself, and then shutting down outright.

Replacing it is not a job to take lightly, and this is where the horror stories come from. Liquid metal is electrically conductive — if it runs off the die onto the board, it shorts components and kills the console. Doing it properly means shielding the surrounding board, applying the correct amount in the correct pattern, and keeping the console oriented so nothing migrates while it cures. It is genuinely easy to destroy a PS5 doing this on a kitchen table with a YouTube video open.

We reapply it with the board masked, and while the console is open we clean the heatsink and fan properly at the same time, because the two faults almost always arrive together. If your console turns out not to need the liquid metal doing, we will tell you and just do the clean.