A PS5 came in from a flat in Meadowbank last month that is a textbook example of this fault. A three-year-old disc edition, hooked up to the TV every evening for Call of Duty and horror co-op, had slowly got louder over the summer and started throwing the yellow “temperature too high” warning through October. The owner had already vacuumed the vents, moved the console from its side onto its back, and tried standing it vertically again. None of it quietened the fan, because none of it reached the actual problem.
A loud or overheating PlayStation 5 is almost never a software fault. It is almost always one of three physical things — dust in the heatsink, the thermal paste and liquid metal on the APU drying out or shifting after three or four years, or the fan’s own bearing starting to fail. The job on the bench is to work out which one, because the fix for each is different. These notes are the way we actually walk through those jobs at the Parkhead Drive workshop, in the order they usually come up, so you can tell at home whether a vent clean will do or whether the console needs to come in.
The Signs a PS5 Is Running Too Hot
Three symptoms separate a tired PS5 from a healthy one, and most consoles that come in show at least two of them together. The first is the fan ramping to maximum while you are only sitting on the main menu or watching Netflix — a healthy PS5 is close to silent in those states, so a loud fan during light tasks is already a problem. The second is a sudden shutdown during a demanding game, often with the CE-108862-5 code or an on-screen temperature warning. The third is a mechanical change in the fan noise itself: a whine, a ticking, or a scraping where it used to just whirr. That last one points at the fan bearing rather than the cooling itself.
If a PS5 crashes during the first fifteen minutes of a cold boot every single time, the fault is almost always something other than heat — a failing power stage or a storage problem. But if the console runs fine for twenty minutes and then the fan tops out and the console shuts down, the temperature path is where to look.
Dust and Pet Hair: The First and Easiest Fix
The intake vents on a PS5 draw a surprising amount of air through the heatsink. Over three or four years in a carpeted room, especially one with a cat or dog, those fins pick up a thick felt of dust and hair. The temperature sensor downstream reads warmer than it should, the fan ramps to compensate, and the console gets noisier for a modest airflow benefit. If you shine a torch into the intakes and can see grey matting between the fins, cleaning will quieten the console for a few months on its own.
Vacuuming the outside of the vents barely touches it. The dust that matters is wrapped around the heatsink fins behind the front cover and the side panels, which come off with a slide and twist (the front one needs a stronger pull than people expect). Once the panels are off, the fan sits above a wide copper heatsink; the dust blanket in there is the real culprit. On a console still inside its Sony warranty window we never crack the fan plate — a surface clean through the side panels is what Sony’s own repair bench starts with, and we match that unless the console is out of warranty.
The Thermal Paste and Liquid Metal Story
Underneath the fan sits a flat metal shim bonded to the APU — the single chip that is both CPU and GPU in a PS5. On a laptop or a desktop that chip usually has a paste or putty between the die and the heatsink. On the PS5 Sony did something unusual: they used liquid metal, a gallium alloy that is a far better heat conductor than any paste but that behaves very differently.
Liquid metal has two awkward tendencies. First, it slowly migrates out of its channel if the console lives on its side rather than flat, and the migration gets faster once the plastic gasket around the die begins to lift. Second, it eats aluminium — which is why that gasket is there, and why a liquid-metal console with a lifted gasket is a repair that has to move to a paste substitute rather than a top-up. The result after three or four years is either a dry patch over part of the APU, with a very hot spot and shutdowns under load, or a smear on to the surrounding board that can short pins if the gasket has given up.
A PS5 that still runs hot after a thorough clean is almost always one of those two patterns. The fix is a repaste — remove the heatsink, lift and inspect the die and shim, replace the liquid metal if the pattern is salvageable, or substitute a high-grade paste if the gasket has failed and liquid metal cannot be used safely any more. It is specialist work; a careless repaste on a PS5 is how consoles end up on our microsoldering bench with shorted traces.
When a Clean and Repaste Isn’t Enough
Occasionally the fan itself is the fault rather than the heatsink. The tell is noise with a bearing’s whine, a repetitive ticking as the blade touches something inside the shroud, or a scraping that only shows up when the console is on its side. By the time a fan is ticking, the bearing has already started to fail and no amount of cleaning will quieten it for long. A replacement fan is a stocked part and goes in during the same bench session as a repaste; we also check the heatsink base is flat and the APU shim has not warped from a bad previous repair.
If the console is beeping on startup, powering up for a few seconds and then shutting straight back down, or showing an overheat code immediately from a cold start, the fault is further than cooling. On the PS5 that usually means a damaged power delivery component on the mainboard, which again sits under microsoldering. If the internal drive has filled with saves and screenshots from a decade of play across PS4 and PS5, we can also recover them off a dead console with our data recovery service before any board work starts.
The Meadowbank Flat Factor
One pattern we see more often from Meadowbank, Easter Road and the Leith end of the city than from newer builds further out is the TV-cabinet problem. The Victorian tenements and converted flats around the Meadowbank Shopping Park and the stadium streets often have the TV tucked into a shallow alcove or a sideboard with cupboard doors, and the PS5 lives on the lower shelf with a few centimetres of clearance either side. Those few centimetres are not enough: the console pulls its own hot exhaust back through the intake within half an hour of play, the fan ramps and holds there, and the thermal paste on the APU dries out one or two years earlier than it would in open air.
If a PS5 lives in a cabinet or a shelf unit and has started to get louder over the last six months, moving it out onto the TV table — or at the very least opening the cabinet doors during a session — buys the console a lot of life before any paste work is needed. On our collection runs through Meadowbank, Portobello and the east of the city, we almost always see a cabinet rather than open shelving, and that one habit is the biggest single predictor of early thermal trouble.
What To Try Before You Bring the PS5 In
Before you unplug anything, do three things in order. Pull the console out of its cabinet or shelf so there are at least ten centimetres of clear air either side. Shine a torch into the intake vents and look for a felt of dust and hair across the fins behind them. Then run a slow game session on the TV table rather than its usual spot and listen to the fan after fifteen minutes. If the fan quietens and no shutdown happens with proper airflow, the console has months of life left and the next step is a professional clean before the paste starts to suffer.
If the fan is still loud after that, or the console shuts down with a temperature warning, the PS5 is worth bringing in. Our Meadowbank console repair page has the collection detail for east-Edinburgh postcodes, and the wider PS5 work — cleaning the heatsink, repasting the APU with the correct liquid-metal or paste substitute, replacing a failing fan, or recovering saves from a dead console — sits under our console repair service, with deeper board faults handled on the microsoldering bench. Related reading if your symptoms differ: a drifting DualSense stick in Tollcross if the console is fine but the controller moves on its own, a PS5 with no picture in Edinburgh city centre if the HDMI output has failed, and an Xbox Series X that won’t power on in Cockenzie if the fault sits on the Microsoft side.
Last updated: 30 October 2026