Sony has published a teardown video of the PlayStation 4 just over a week before the company's next generation console is slated to hit stores in North America. Sony engineering director Yasuhiro Ootori is responsible for dismantling the machine which is held together externally by just four screws.
Visually, there are no screws to be seen on the exterior of the machine. The aforementioned screws are hidden behind seals at the rear of the console to discourage users from taking it apart. Once open, however, we see the fan, heatsink, optical disc drive and the power supply.
That's right, the power supply has been integrated inside the machine because, as Ootori says, it wouldn't be very convenient for customers if there was a separate power supply unit. Elsewhere we find a Bluetooth antenna and the 500GB hard drive which needs just one screw removed to take out.
The stock drive is a 5400 RPM SATA II drive which Ootori notes can be exchanged for any commercially available drive. A quick check of the PlayStation 4 FAQ confirms this, noting you'll need a drive that is no thicker than 9.5mm and is larger than 160GB. What the FAQ doesn't outline specifically is whether the SATA controller SATA II or SATA III. A solid state drive swap would give a slight performance boost when limited by a SATA II controller but with a SATA III controller, things could really fly.
Digging deeper, we are shown the motherboard with embedded CPU / GPU, GDDR5 memory, secondary processor, Wi-Fi antenna and various connectors.
"When you put all of these together, you have the PlayStation 4," Ootori concludes.