As many of you I was surprised of Sonys approach to cooling. We all were expecting a beefy cooler after PS4 "jet engine" fail, but to anyone who's into PC building, overclocking, etc. it's obvious that they did a total overkill and a really state of the art job.
Voices and concerns are risen as for "LM is it ok in vertical, i heard is degrading, who uses it on pc changes LM periodically" etc.
Well, vertical/horizontal doesn't matter. I'm not getting into detail with that.
What does matter is over time degradation, also corrosion, and thermal expanding of the material.
1st there's no such thing as LM, there is but quite toxic (mercury). So all LM compounds are enriched mixes of different stuff with gallium. During the time it evaporates and oxidizes, sometimes causing the reaction with the cooling block surface (google it, plenty of pics "my water block after 2 y of LM").
Sony tackled the issue by sealing the die and the compound hermetically under the radiator. We've seen this on their patent, but couldn't interpret it earlier.
You can see on the pic that there's a seal around SOC chip with a tiny gap around.
Gap is for the thermal expansion of LM. If it was sealed flat, there would be constant pressure build-ups during heating up which might have lead to die degradation.
It's clearly visible on the patent, that this tiny gap creates a compartment around the SOC, and all conductive elements are sealed under and around it.
Providing the CPU has around 40W TDP and GPU can be estimated up to 140W, this is a really nice solution. I think that PS5 has to run cool, not for the sake of being quiet, but for the necessity of high clocks speed. OC 1.0.1 - to increase the clock you either push more voltage or lower the temps, usually both until you hit the wall.
Sony had to keep the temps low, to be able to hit 2.23 GHz without pushing more voltage. And it's very much connected to the SOC architecture approach they took (vide Mark's explanation on Road to PS5 presentation). The variable clock rates and the AMD smart shift are limiting clocks to a fixed power budget, but when you keep the temps at bay, the same power budget allows you to crank the clocks higher.
Xbox constructors went to a different way (traditional) of solving power issues - IMHO they went to the brute force way, clocked the GPU significantly lower and build power balance around the fixed/max operating temperature not a constant one. They didn't have to worry about cooling the components that much, and Xbox will be far more resilient to temperature, thus doesn't need as beefy cooler. It will run hotter, but it's not a flaw. ZEN2 cores can run 70 degrees all day long, VRM and DDR6 can run on 100+ and still be in spec. Some RDNA1 cards are running 90 degress.
TLDR; Sony did a great job, the console will be cool and quiet and we won't have to change LM over time as PC users do.