We are talking about the PlayStation 4 Pro, a console that promises games scaled to 4K, an impossible temperature to meet for a sandwich maker and a lot of lack of clarity in terms of the hardware it incorporates.

The other day we commented on the technical aspects of Microsoft's Project Scorpio, some characteristics of it that are not official, but that point to be. Today we want to focus on the Sony console, the PlayStation 4 Pro, but also comparing it with the Microsoft console. We must emphasize that consoles, in general, have a serious cooling problem, since space is very limited, air intakes are not good and turbine-type heatsinks are not the best solution in the world in terms of cooling.

Sony in your case gives less data than Microsoft. Sony's console uses an AMD Jaguar processor with eight cores at a completely indeterminate frequency, which by the way, is the same as Project Scropio's, therefore it is an interesting similarity. The PS 4 Pro has an AMD Radeon GPU, we assume that based on the Polaris architecture with a power of 4.2TFLOPS, the Microsoft version in this wins, offering 6TFLOPS. This is a very interesting fact that I would like to recount.

We have to bear in mind that today, in the market, to move 4K with an optimal fps rate, this being at least 30fps stable and not falling below this volume, is complex and requires at least a GTX 1080 and a good processor. Quad-core processors tend to have some problems when it comes to maintaining that frame rate, due to the specific weight of moving those resolutions. Ryzen in this regard are better because they can balance the load. Sure, at this point one might think that Jaguar is a good solution.

The problem with AMD Jaguar is that it is very obsolete. In the processor market, Intel until the arrival of Ryzen has enjoyed more than a year of freedom in the market, so Jaguar was not a useful solution for anyone, since they had a high consumption and absurd temperatures in their last moment What's more, there was an AMD processor based on Jaguar at 5GHz that AMD gave you an RL AIO as a heatsink of what was heated, crazy. It is clear that they have opted for Jaguar because they are very cheap processors, since they are of obsolete architecture.

Returning to the Sony console, we must say that it carries 8GB GDDR5. It does not specify how much memory is allocated to the operating system and how much to games. If it is balanced, it is a mess and a graphics card with 6GB GDDR5 is a mid-range graphics card, at best, therefore, we are facing a horrible solution. We just have to think that a basic gamer team has 8GB DDR4 only for the processor and the graphics has its own. Also note that for gaming it is recommended to buy at least 16GB, but that is already for wider budget margins. We know that GDDR5 is faster than DDR4, but come on, betting on the same type of memory for everything is a bit crappy.

I still don't understand mechanical storage on consoles. The previous generation of consoles had a certain explanation because the price of SSDs was still somewhat high, but now that you can find 240GB for less than € 100, it seems that it is absurd to bet on a mechanical unit. The problem is that the games have to be installed, as on the computer, therefore, is there so much difference between a computer and a console? Well, the truth is that yes, a computer allows you to navigate comfortably, view content, do work and a lot of other things, consoles are shoe boxes with hardware packed inside and an operating system, to call it somehow.

Something that I don't quite understand is the three very high speed ports, which are USB 3.1 Gen1. What do you need USB 3.1 for? I am not able to understand it, because at most you will connect a keyboard and a mouse or some USB memory, but is it really necessary in a console something superior to USB 2.0? The 802.11ac WiFi console and Bluetooth 4.0 have an Ethernet port, come on, the least that could be asked of any laptop.

Sony sells it as a 4K gaming console, although in all the specifications they forget to say that it is a 4K upscaling, which are not real, so they can offer good frame rates. Something that I did not like are the images, very well defined, surely they are from a PC capture, since it would not be the first time that a console is presented and moves a game and it is really a computer that moves the game, because that has happened. Everyone here has gone crazy with 4K, but really these hardware shoeboxes do not move real 4K or by chance and if they do, in two days burned.

I'm saving the party for last. Maximum consumption 310W, which is good, considering that it is AMD hardware, we are going to put 500W, which we know each other. The best are the operating temperatures: 5ºC-35ºC. Are you telling me that this console on load has the same temperature as a GTX 1080 Ti with a custom heatsink by a manufacturer? If anyone believes that this sandwich maker is capable of operating at that temperature, let them look at it. The consoles have a problem, the cooling, the turbine heatsinks dissipate just enough and having to dissipate the processor, graphics and RAM temperature at the same time is an unworkable madness for the heatsinks that usually install.

If fans are installed in the towers to lower the temperature to the maximum and even so, with AMD graphics, they heat up like crazy, that with an RX 580 you can heat a room, I do not want to imagine the temperature that will get, with input by the air sides in passive mode and the crazy fan. But the most screwed up is not at first, after three or four months of use, the fan takes a good layer of dust and what happens, because heat dissipation power is lost and the temperature rises, but you cannot clean it, for the warranty.

This explains why more and more users are migrating to computers, because with a good investment they can have plenty of hardware to spend years. With the € 400 that the Sony console costs and € 200 more you can get a very good equipment to play for a long time. Right now there is the problem of the price of the RAM, which is very expensive, but otherwise, a RX 580 or a GTX 1060 and to run the game that you want for you know how long. Honestly, that Sony and Microsoft insist on continuing to make consoles, it is absurd.

I would like to close with a reflection. It's funny how Sony and Microsoft use hardware from AMD and not from Intel or NVIDIA, the reason is simple, AMD offers product customization, to try to get the full potential of it or improve it. Intel and NVIDIA do not do that, they offer a very wide product catalog and within the catalog you choose the hardware you want and if not, then to look elsewhere. This is because Intel and NVIDIA have no need to develop for consoles, because they have a very high and clear market share and consider that they have products for everything and it would be a waste of time that they could use to develop technologies that they consider more interesting.