The PS5 slim is here, but it doesn’t come from Sony

This super-slim Sony PlayStation 5 makes the first-gen PS5 look ridiculous

DIY Perks PS5 slim console
(Image credit: DIY Perks / YouTube)

I hate my PS5. Not the inside, or the games. The outside. I hate the look-at-me design, the ridiculous dimensions, the silly little stand, the way I have to carefully consider how to reconfigure or miss out bits of an IKEA unit to fit its incredible bulk. My Xbox Series X is much less arrogant: it has no desire to dominate my living room; it knows it doesn't need to be flashy to be fun. So this PS5 Slim design is very much the PS5 I wish Sony had made.

The PS5 Slim isn't a Sony project, although we know they're almost certainly working on a PS5 Slim internally. It's by YouTuber DIY Perks, whose video I've embedded below. It's a fully functional PS5 but without the giant footprint.

How to make your PS5 Slim

DIY Perks hasn't just put his PS5 in a different box. He's substituted key components with similar but smaller parts, and he's added his own home-made creations including that shiny case. He also had to remove the power supply to put it outside the console and create a brand new water-cooling system to stop the console from overheating. It turns out that his cooling system performed even better than Sony's.

It is a brilliant project and a superb bit of work, but when you watch the video you'll also see that it's a very big project that really isn't for the faint-hearted: the gap between what I'm seeing on screen and what I'm capable of, even if I had all the same kit, is even bigger than my PS5. So for now I'll have to keep on doing what I've been doing, pretending not to notice the elephant-sized console in the room.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).