The Razer Kishi V2 is redesigned around a more-solid sliding bridge, which will allow for wider device compatibility compared to the original pad's flexible bridge. The rubber inserts that hold your phone snug can also be removed, which Razer helpfully says will support "some phones with phone cases." Good luck figuring out if that includes yours.
While the main inputs look unchanged, the V2's switches — the things underneath the buttons that actually register that you're pressing them — have also been reworked, swapping out membranes for the microswitches found in Razer's Wolverine console pad. There are also tweaks to the function keys, with a dedicated 'Share' button added at the front and a pair of programmable bumpers situated next to the shoulder triggers.
The Razer Nexus app
Razer
The Share button will only work with Razer Nexus, the company's new companion app for Android that it hopes you'll launch your games from. Nexus will also help you discover compatible games, stream your gameplay to YouTube or Facebook, tweak controller settings and program those new bumpers.
As with the original pad, the Kishi V2 connects over USB-C, avoiding the latency of Bluetooth options. The Android version is available today for $99.99, and an iOS version will hit the market this fall.
At its CES press conference today, NVIDIA teased a new flagship GPU: the RTX 3090 Ti. It says more details will arrive soon, but handed out a few specs to tide its fans over until then.
As a refresher, NVIDIA currently has the RTX 3090 at the top of its stack, with the RTX 3080 Ti close behind and the RTX 3080 as the mainstream flagship. All three are based on the same GA102 chip, with the number of active cores, clock speeds and memory configurations being the key differentiators. The RTX 3090 Ti will usurp the 3090 as the ultra high-end GPU outside of its creator line.
Like the 3090, the 3090 Ti will have 24GB of GDDR6X memory, except it’ll be running at 21Gbit/s, as opposed to the 19.5Gbit/s of the 3090’s memory. NVIDIA also says the GPU is capable of calculating 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops and 320 tensor (AI) teraflops That compares to the 3090’s 35.6 shader teraflops, 69.5 RT teraflops and 285 tensor teraflops.
Those figures represent a 12.5-ish percent increase over the 3090 across the board, and will likely make the 3090 Ti the most powerful gaming card ever released. We won’t know exactly how NVIDIA has achieved this until it shares full specs, but we can make some educated guesses.
The 3090 only has 82 out of the GA102’s 84 streaming multiprocessors activated, so it’s likely the 3090 Ti has all 84 running. Then, in addition to the memory clocks being a little faster, it’s likely NVIDIA has elevated the main GPU clock speeds slightly. Some napkin math suggests the boost clock will need to be at around 1,850MHz on the 3090 Ti (compared to 1,695MHz on the 3090) to reach the 40-teraflop figure NVIDIA has provided.
NVIDIA says “more details will be coming later this month,” so we’d expect a small event focused on the 3090 Ti to be announced soon, where we’ll find out how exorbitantly priced the 3090 Ti will be – remember that the 3090 itself has an RRP of $1,500 – and when people will theoretically be able to buy one.
NVIDIA
Also announced at CES is the RTX 3050, which is set to become the cheapest 30-series desktop GPU to date. NVIDIA hasn’t given us full specifications on this one either, but it has 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and will be able to calculate 9 shader teraflops, 18 RT teraflops and 73 tensor teraflops. NVIDIA says it’ll be able to power “the latest ray-traced games at over 60 frames per second,” which is probably true if factoring in the company’s DLSS upscaling tech.
As is usually the case with lower-end cards, there won’t be a “founders” edition sold directly by NVIDIA, but the RTX 3050 will go on sale through the company’s various hardware partners on January 27th, with an RRP of $250.
Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!
Companies like Razer, Alienware and Asus ROG have been offering laptops with RTX 3080 and 3070 GPUs inside for a while now, but over the summer NVIDIA launched a pair of upgraded desktop cards: the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti. Now, the company is bringing the “Ti” brand over to laptops.
The 3080 Ti will be available in laptops priced $2,499 and above. NVIDIA says it’s faster than last generation’s Titan RTX desktop card, and will be able to play (unspecified) games with 1440p ultra settings at over 120 fps. It also features 16GB of GDDR6 clocked at “the fastest ever seen in a laptop.” Exact details beyond that haven’t been shared yet, but the first 3080 Ti laptops will be available in February, so we won’t have long till we find out exactly what they’re capable of.
The 3070 Ti will be available in laptops priced $1,499 and above. NVIDIA says this one is “70 percent faster than the RTX 2070 Super laptops,” which isn’t a particularly helpful figure but hey-ho. It’ll apparently be able to run 1440p games at ultra settings at 100 fps, and, again, will start appearing in laptops in February.
Finally, NVIDIA announced some new technologies for Max-Q laptops, including an AI CPU Optimizer which can control the frequencies and power draw of certain Intel and AMD "nex-gen" CPUs, Rapid Core Scaling which can turn off some GPU cores while boosting the frequencies of others for productivity tasks, and Battery Boost 2.0, which will tune both your game and your hardware to apparently improve gaming while on battery. NVIDIA claims that last one can increase your battery life by 70-percent, presumably at the expense of in-game performance.and fidelity.
Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!
For basically the entire modern history of esports, 1080p has been the sweet spot for competitive gaming. The wisdom goes that a 1920 x 1080 pixel grid gives enough clarity to follow all of the gameplay, while also being light enough that the GPU can process hundreds of frames per second, giving a competitive advantage (or, at least, leveling the playing field).
GPUs today have outgrown 1080p in a big way, though, with flagship cards being able to pump out framerates way above the peak of monitor refresh rates in certain titles. Valorant, for example, can be played at High settings well in excess of 500 fps on NVIDIA’s latest and greatest, while older titles like CS:GO hit over 700 fps.
NVIDIA says that an RTX 3080 paired with an Intel i9-12900K can play Valorant, CS:GO, Overwatch and Rainbow Six Seige in excess of 360 fps at 1440p. With that in mind, the company thinks the time is right for the leap beyond 1080p.
Obviously NVIDIA is motivated by the need to convince gamers to buy expensive GPUs, but apparently there’s a competitive benefit to playing at higher resolution. NVIDIA's own researchers found that a 27-inch 1440p display can improve aiming “by up to 3 percent” over the 24-inch 1080p sets used by current pros.
This new “1440p esports category” begins with four NVIDIA-certified displays: the ASUS ROG Swift 360Hz PG27AQN, the AOC AG274QGM - AGON PRO Mini LED, the MSI MEG 271Q Mini LED and the ViewSonic XG272G-2K Mini LED. The ASUS set is a 360Hz monitor, while the others feature Mini LED backlights but cap out at 300Hz.
All four monitors support G-Sync adaptive refresh rates, an “Esports Vibrance” color mode and, more importantly for the target audience, support NVIDIA’s Reflex latency analyzer. Intriguingly, the new monitors also come with a “1080p mode,” which blanks out the outer edges of the screen to provide a 25-inch 1080p “display” for gaming. There must be some clever scaling going on here, as a 1:1 1080p rendering on a 27-inch 1440p monitor would be a 21-ish inch image. Either way, this mode would be vital for some games – newer esports titles can be more graphically intense than the stalwarts, and playing at 1440p could sacrifice the sort of refresh rates esports pros want for competitive play.
There’s no word on pricing yet, although don’t expect them to be remotely affordable for the average gamer. As for when they’ll be available, NVIDIA has only given out the vague “soon.”
Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!
In the space of a few years, we’ve gone from 5W USB adapters being the norm, to iPads and Nintendo Switches being able to charge at 18W, all the way up to modern laptops drawing up to 140W. This explosion in charging rates over a (somewhat) standardized USB-C connector has been great for consumers who can now mostly charge their stuff with one or two well-positioned adapters. But, it’s made choosing the right power bank to keep all of your devices topped up on the go way more difficult.
Enter Elecjet, a small company which has been carving out a niche for itself by using graphene in adapters and power banks. It launched its first “graphene-enhanced battery power bank,” on Indiegogo back in 2019, and is now back with the Elecjet Apollo Ultra. It’s a 37Wh (10,000mAh) power bank with a couple of notable specs: It can be charged at 100W, and can output at up to 87W across its two ports.
These numbers are very high. On the output side, most 10,000mAh battery packs top out at around 18W; it’s only chunkier chargers that reach figures like 65W. On the input side of things, you’re looking at around 30W as the peak for a high-end portable charger. (There is a market for “laptop power stations,” which can meet and in some cases best Elecjet’s input and output numbers, but those are typically bulky units.)
My personal power bank at the moment is a 20,000mAh Anker PowerCore, which maxes out at around 25W output and 30W input. Although it’s double the capacity of the graphene model, after about a month of using a pre-production unit Elecjet sent me, I don’t want to go back.
Before I get into that, what does a “graphene-enhanced battery” even mean? Elecjet takes the lithium cells that are inside every device nowadays, and plays with the chemistry. Its “composite graphene cells,” mix a graphene solution in with the lithium in the cathode, and then add some layers of graphene coating the anode.
What you get from this sprinkling of graphene is much improved performance at the expense of size. Thanks to offering lower resistance and higher thermal conductivity, Elecjet’s graphene-lithium composite cells can theoretically be charged five times faster, and run through five times more charge cycles, but are about 25 percent less energy dense than regular lithium. So, composite graphene batteries are faster and run cooler, but will either have a lower capacity or a larger size when compared to the batteries we’re used to.
I’m not really close to pushing the Apollo Ultra to its stated 87W limit. The devices I need to charge on the regular are an iPhone 12, a Nintendo Switch and an M1 MacBook Air. It happily charges my Nintendo Switch at 18W, my iPhone at 20W, and my MacBook Air at around 45W.
That last figure is actually higher than the charger that came with the MacBook Air, but on plugging in a 65W Apple charger from a MacBook Pro, I saw essentially the same figure, so it appears that’s a safe rate for the battery. I did run some tests on a friend’s 13-inch MacBook Pro, though, and found it was able to charge it at a similar speed to the 65W charger that device came with, so I have no reason to doubt the output claims.
Speaking of claims, this is nitpicking to the extreme, but the Apollo Ultra’s USB-C port outputs at up to 65W, and its USB-A port can handle 18W. With the PPS power spec it can output at 68.25W, but none of these combinations add up to the claimed 87W output figure.
Output aside, the main benefit for me is how fast you can charge the battery itself. I’m quite forgetful, and will often be getting ready to leave the house with my phone on low battery, and then go to pick up my power bank only to find out it’s empty. I’m sure that’ll still happen, because if I haven’t learned in 36 years to prepare for life adequately I’m not about to change now. But being able to charge the Apollo Ultra so quickly has meant it’s really not an issue. Plugging it in for about 6-7 minutes gives me enough juice to charge my iPhone from the red up to 100 percent, and honestly even a couple of minutes before I run out of the door has got me home without my phone dying on me. Although the pre-production units are limited to 87W input (and so took about 35 minutes to charge), the final, 100W edition will charge from 0 to full in under half an hour. It’s like a safety net for my own stupidity.
Its small size, at least in comparison to my regular power bank, is also a plus. At 130 x 68mm, Elecjet’s bank has roughly the same footprint as an iPhone 13 mini, and it’s about 17mm thick. It’s totally pocketable for most folks, or at the least jacket-pocketable, which is not something I can say about my Anker. It’s also, in my opinion, pretty attractive for a power bank, with nice quality white and black plastics, and a proper display that shows the battery percentage. After years of divining how much power is left with four little LEDs, having so many degrees of precision is very nice.
For everything I love about its size and build quality, there’s no getting around the fact that the Apollo Ultra’s overall capacity is quite low. It can handle about two thirds of a MacBook Air’s charge, two and a bit Switch charges, or three-ish charges of a modern smartphone. That’s… absolutely fine. But the benefits of being able to charge something at 65W are somewhat limited when the battery drains in 35 minutes at that rate.
What I really want is impossible with today’s tech: Something this size, just as performant, but double the capacity. In the future, Elecjet says it will be able to make the power module smaller to mitigate the density issue, and it also claims it has “ a new battery under the wraps” that can get far closer to the density of regular cells.
In the meantime, it would be great to see Elecjet expand its current Apollo Ultra range to include larger capacity batteries. Some options would be good, so buyers can pick the compromise that suits them. A 55Wh battery pack would only be 50 percent larger, but handle a wider variety of devices. Even a 75Wh battery would only be double the volume.
Judging the pricing Elecjet has opted for is difficult. The Apollo Ultra is on Indiegogo at $65, which is honestly the most expensive I’ve seen a battery pack of this capacity in recent memory. But it behaves more like the ultra-high end battery packs that go for $100+, and unlike those fits in my jeans pocket. But it doesn’t last as long as those— you see my problem. I think $65 is a reasonable price for what you get here. It’s a sleek, cool-looking thing, and the fast-charging makes it more useful to me than a “regular” larger-capacity battery pack.
As with all Indiegogo products, there’s a big caveat in that you are not buying a product that currently exists. Production will begin shortly, and users backing today should expect their devices in early 2022. I have a working unit on my desk, so I’m confident that Elecjet can deliver a power bank as advertised. But the company’s past Indiegogo campaigns do lead to even more caveats.
Both the Elecjet Apollo and Apollo Max campaigns had issues. A few users reported exploding power banks, others never received their units and, perhaps worst of all, users who complained through the Indiegogo campaigns were left without answers for months or in a couple of cases years. All of the complaints have now been addressed, but only in the past few days leading up to the launch of the new product.
Elecjet merged with another company named Real Graphene earlier this year. Both companies were founded by the same person, Samuel Gong, a UC Berkeley engineering graduate, but Gong says he was not involved in the day-to-day operations of Elecjet until the two merged. When I asked about the complaints surrounding prior campaigns, Gong acknowledged that “there were some issues with the previous products’ quality,” and said most people who didn’t receive their product failed to provide a shipping address through Indiegogo. He said the company “was being managed by another team, and previous campaigns and products were done by [that] team.” He added that the new Apollo Ultra was extensively prototyped and has been evaluated by UL (a well-regarded certification company) for safety. (The press pack Elecjet provided touts “8 safety features” and notes the device never exceeded 42C in testing.)
As for not responding to customer support requests, he acknowledged that, after the merger, the company “couldn’t dedicate enough time to previous campaigns.” The reason he gave for the sudden responses to old complaints was that a new team has been hired to manage the Indiegogo campaign, and that team is also aiding backers of old projects from before the new leadership team was around.
I’m extremely into the Elecjet Apollo Ultra. It’s rare that I’m interested, let alone excited, about a product as dull as a power bank, but it’s always good to see something totally new enter any tech space. Those caveats are certainly worrying, though. If you’re not willing to take the risk but are still interested, Elecjet does have its own retail site, and a sizable Amazon presence, for its other products. You could always wait for the product to launch and hit more traditional retail channels (at a slightly inflated price) further down the line.
Sony, arguably nine months too late, is finally unlocking the 10 million PlayStation 5s around the world to accept expandable SSD storage. At launch, the next-gen console offered only 667GB of space for storing your PS5 games, with no way to expand that. While that’s been fine for some (like me), others (like my son) have been performing a near-daily juggling act, having to frequently delete and re-download games due to the restrictive storage size and the apparent need to have constant access to every Call of Duty game.
With the upcoming system software update — currently in beta testing — you’ll be able to increase your storage by slotting in a standard PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD. If that mess of acronyms has you recoiling, don’t worry, you’ll see that it’s not all that complicated, and if you want to know which drives we recommend, you can skip to the end.
How much storage do I need?
Aaron Souppouris / Engadget
The PS5 will accept drives between 250GB and 4TB in capacity. If you already have a PlayStation 5, chances are you have a reasonable idea of how much storage you want. If you’re buying an SSD with a new PS5, or buying for someone else, though, it’s difficult to tell.
PS5 games are a little smaller on average than their PS4 equivalents, typically ranging between 30GB and 100GB, with some notable (and very popular) exceptions. If you’re a fan of the Call of Duty series, just having Cold War multiplayer and Modern Warfare/Warzone installed will require 307GB of space. A full Warzone-Modern Warfare-Cold War install will take up almost two thirds of the PS5’s internal storage. If you’re not a CoD fan, though, chances are you’ll be good to store between six to 10 games on your PS5 internally before running into problems.
One additional thing to consider is your internet speed. If you live in an area with slow broadband, the “you can just download it again” rationale doesn’t really work out. A 100GB download takes me around eight hours, during which time it's difficult to simultaneously watch Twitch or, say, publish articles about upgrading PS5 SSDs. Keeping games around on the off-chance you’ll want to play them at some point make sense, at least for my household.
Off the bat, there's basically no point in going for a 250GB drive. Economically, 250GB drives aren’t that much cheaper than 500GB, and practically, that really isn’t a lot of space for modern games to live on. 500GB drives, coming in at around $90 to $150, are a decent bet, but the sweet spot for most is to opt for a 1TB drive, which should run you between $160 and $250. That will more than double the space you have available for games without breaking the bank. (Seagate’s official 1TB Xbox Series expansion card, for comparison, sells for $220.)
If you have the money, 2TB drives sometimes offer marginal savings per gigabyte, and can often be found when other models are out of stock. Unless you’re rolling in cash and want to flex, 4TB models should mostly be avoided, as you’ll end up paying more per gigabyte than you would with a 1TB or 2TB drive.
One final note: While the 825GB PS5 only provides 667GB of storage, that’s largely due to storage being reserved for the operating system and caching. If you install a 1TB SSD, you'll have, within margin of error, 1TB of storage available for games.
What about external SSDs?
Samsung
These are dramatically cheaper than the high-end internal SSDs, but there are restrictions on what you can do with them. An external SSD connects to your PS5 via USB, and is only suitable for playing PS4 games, or storing PS5 titles. This is useful if you have anything but the best internet — it’s faster to move a PS5 game out of “cold storage” on an external drive than it is to re-download it — or just want a large number of PS4 games to hand.
Due to the limitations here, you don’t need the highest performing model, although you should opt for SSDs over HDDs for improved transfer speeds. Any basic portable drive from a reputable brand will do, with the Crucial X6 and Samsung T5 being options we’ve tried and can recommend.
What SSDs are compatible with PS5?
The official answer to this question is an “M.2 Socket 3 (Key M) Gen4 x4 NVME SSD.” But even within that seemingly specific description, there are still more things to consider. The main requirements Sony has laid out for compatibility come down to speed, cooling and physical dimensions.
For speed, Sony says drives should be able to handle sequential reads at 5,500MB/s. Early testing has shown that drives as slow as 4,800MB/s are accepted by the PS5, and using them to play a game that taps into the SSD regularly — such as Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — causes no issues. Pretty much the only thing the PS5 will outright reject is one that doesn't match the Gen4 x4 spec.
In our opinion, though, using a drive slower than the specification is a risk that, if you don’t already have that drive lying around, is not worth taking. Just because we haven’t found issues now, that doesn’t mean there won’t be games that will be problematic down the line. The price difference between these marginally slower Gen4 drives and the ones that meet Sony’s spec is not huge, and you may as well cover all your bases.
Slightly more complicated than speed is cooling and size. Most bare SSDs are going to be just fine; the PS5 can fit 22mm-wide SSDs of virtually any length (30mm, 42mm, 60mm, 80mm or 110mm, to be precise). The vast majority of drives you find will be 22mm wide and 80mm long, so no problem there.
It should be noted that the system can fit a 25mm-wide drive, but that width must include the cooling solution. Speaking of, Sony says SSDs require “effective heat dissipation with a cooling structure, such as a heatsink,” which is where most of the complications arise.
The maximum height supported by Sony’s slot is 11.25mm, of which only 2.45mm can be “below” the drive. This is intensely specific, and rules out some popular heatsinked Gen4 SSDs such as Corsair’s MP600 Pro and Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus. With time, it’s likely that manufacturers will want in on this new avenue for high-end SSD sales, and these heatsink size limits are going to become the de facto standard for the industry. In the meantime, however, only a couple of heatsinked drives fit out of the box.
If you’re looking to save some money, bare drives are often much cheaper and prevalent than their heatsinked alternatives, and it’s trivial to find a cooling solution that will work for the PS5.
The only component in an NVMe SSD that really requires cooling is the controller, which without a heatsink will happily sear a (very small) steak. Most SSDs have chips on only one side, but even on double-sided SSDs, the controller is likely to be on top, as manufacturers know it needs to be positioned there to better dissipate heat. So, head to your PC component seller of choice, and pick up basically anything that meets the recommended dimensions. A good search term is “laptop NVME heatsink,” as these will be designed to fit in the confines of gaming laptops, which are even more restrictive than a PS5. They’re also typically cheaper than the ones popping up now that are labelled as “PS5 heatsinks.”
One recommendation is this $7 copper heatsink, which attaches to the SSD with sticky thermal interface material. It works just fine, and really, performing stress tests on a PC, we couldn’t find anything metal that didn’t keep temperatures under control. When you’re searching, just make sure the solution you go for measures no more than 25mm wide or 8mm tall including the thermal interface material and has a simple method of installation that’s not going to cause any headaches.
Now, if all of that was very boring, here are some ready-to-go recommendations:
Best PS5 SSD: Patriot Viper VP4300
Patriot
Patriot may not be the biggest name in components, but it has a long history in the PC market, and the Viper VP4300 is a solid drive for the PS5. With a sequential read rating of 7,400MB/s and a slim heatsink preinstalled, it meets all the necessary requirements for a simple upgrade. The reason it tops our list is the cost. It comes in 1TB and 2TB varieties, both of which are competitively priced. Expect to pay around $210 for the 1TB version or $430 for the 2TB.
If you’re not a PC user, PNY is another company you probably haven’t heard of. Again, though, it has a good track record, operating for three decades out of the US. The XLR8 CS3040 is a fantastic value option, though it will require you to add your own cooling solution, as the one PNY sells won’t fit in the PS5.
While that may sound like a hassle, maybe the pricing will convince you: The $90 500GB option is great, but the $160 1TB drive is a steal, and the $307 2TB model is also outrageously cheap. As mentioned, we don’t really recommend 4TB drives but, among the typically four-figure options on the market, PNY’s $700 CS3040 is the only one that makes any sense.
The SN850 is a plug-and-play option for the PS5, with a sequential read rating well above the necessary numbers and a 6.5mm-high heatsink preinstalled. It comes in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB varieties, all of which are priced fairly competitively, though the price-per-GB of the 1TB and 2TB is significantly lower than the 500GB.
Expect to pay around $140 for the 500GB drive, $250 for the 1TB version or $430 for the 2TB. If you’re willing to go it alone on the heatsink, those prices drop to around $120, $200 and $400, respectively.
We haven’t been able to test this one ourselves, as it starts shipping “this summer,” but given Seagate is a trusted brand and has outright said its heatsinked drive supports PS5, we’re happy to include it on this list. Unfortunately, the list pricing on the 530s is high, at $160 for 500GB, $260 for 1TB, $540 for 2TB and $1,000 for 4TB. The non-heatsink version will retail at $140, $240 and $490, for the 500GB, 1TB and 2TB versions. These aren't a million miles away from the RRP on other drives on this list that have a lower real-world price now, so we’d expect that you’ll be able to find some deals at similar rates down the line.
Samsung does not sell a 980 Pro with a heatsink attached, but it does have a fantastic reputation for reliability, and prices that are competitive with WD, Seagate and others on this list. Expect to pay around $130 for 500GB, $190 for 1TB, or $370 for 2TB.
Crucial’s P5 Plus is another budget model, which missed out on the “best cheap SSD” spot thanks to PNY’s marginally lower prices. Again, this one has no heatsink, so you’ll need to supply your own. The 1TB drive is the sweet-spot option, coming in at $180, while the 500GB and 2TB drives will set you back $108 and $368, respectively.
Sabrent sells a bunch of Rocket drives, but only the Plus model actually meets Sony’s requirements, so be sure you’re looking at the correct model before you buy. The Rocket 4 Plus’ heatsink is too chunky to fit in the PS5, so you’ll again have to fit your own cooling solution. Sabrent typically has aggressive pricing, but as of writing the Plus hasn’t seen any major discounts. The 1TB model can be found at around $180, the 2TB $360 and the 4TB for $900.
As of writing, the first thing you’ll need to install an SSD is access to the semi-closed system software beta. From an admittedly small sample, I’ve yet to hear of people being denied access to this; everyone I know who's applied was accepted within a week. You can enroll here if you’re in the US, or you can google “PlayStation 5 System Software Beta Program sign-up” to find your local sign-up link.
Once you have the beta on your PS5, installation of a PS5 SSD is fairly straightforward. Sony recommends a #1 Phillips or crosshead screwdriver, but this isn't rocket science. Any crossed screwdriver of similar size will do fine.
Begin by powering down your PS5, unplugging everything, removing the stand and flipping it over to its underside. If you have the regular PS5, that’s the side with the disc drive, if you have the Digital Edition, it’s the side without the PlayStation logo cutout.
Sony has a video guide to popping off the outside cover here, but the gist is you gently lift up the opposing corners and slide the panel towards the flat end of the console. There’s a knack to this, and it requires very little effort or strength. If you’re not getting it, rather than force it just readjust your grip and try again. A member of our video team managed to break one of the tabs on our review unit doing this last November so… yeah, don’t force it.
Engadget
Once you’ve got everything open, you’ll see a rectangular piece of metal with a screw holding it in place. Remove that screw, and you’ll be able to access the drive bay.
You’ll see five holes inside, each numbered corresponding to the standard SSD drive lengths I mentioned earlier. The one numbered 110 will have a metal insert and screw inside. You need to unscrew the screw with a screwdriver, and then unscrew the insert with your fingers and move it to the relevant hole. Your eyes should tell you which is the right one for your drive, but it’s most likely going to be 80.
Aaron Souppouris/Engadget
Then take your SSD — mine is a 980 Pro I bought on Prime Day with a $2 piece of aluminum attached to the top — and slot it in. The slot is at the edge closest to the number “30,” and SSDs are keyed to only fit in one way, so again, no force is required. If it’s not sliding in, don’t force it. You’ll notice the SSD doesn’t sit flat — that’s fine, and is as intended.
Engadget
Once the SSD is seated, take the screw you removed from the insert, line it up with the little notch at the end of your SSD, and push down so it meets the insert. Give the screw it a few turns — it doesn’t need to be very tight — and you’re done.
Engadget
Replace the metal cover and screw it down, and then slide the plastic outer shell back on. When you first turn on the PS5, it’ll prompt you to format the drive. Do that! You have now successfully expanded your console’s storage, and can set about downloading and moving games to it. Personally, I moved all of the PS4 games I had to the new drive, along with all of my clips and screenshots. The PS5’s built-in SSD is always going to be the most compliant, so I’m keeping my important stuff there.
We'll be updating this guide as more SSDs come to market and onto our test bench, so feel free to bookmark it for when you need it.
How do you create DLC for a game whose very purpose is to offer a confined, looping world? Honestly, after watching the trailer for Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, I still have no idea. Outer Wilds was one of our favorite games of 2019, building an enthralling mystery into a non-linear exploration game that effectively restarts every 22 minutes.
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, the game's first and final DLC, will build on the game with new narrative threads and locales. Not much is known beyond that, but based on the strength of the original, I'm down to play an expanded version. Hopefully, the expansion will persuade more people to try out this gem of a game, which, as Devindra Hardawar wrote in ourFavorite games of 2019 article, "demands patience and an adventurous spirit," but "promises adventure like nothing else." Echoes of the Eye will be available September 28th for PS4, Xbox One and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store for $14.99
