Changing the look of your PS5? Easy — the slightest amount of elbow grease will let you pop on new plates. But if you want to seriously mod that sucker for bragging rights, you can now preorder a $450 monoblock that lets you liquid-cool every single component on both sides of Sony’s board.
It’s called the QuantumX, and it’s by EK Water Blocks, a company that sells all kinds of gear for DIYers to build their own custom loop water cooling for high-end PCs.
And let’s be clear: you will need all kinds of custom liquid cooling gear if you go down this road. The company isn’t selling an entire DIY kit, just the cooling block. Your $450 buys you a sandwich of nickel-plated electrolytic copper for your PS5’s components, a transparent acrylic window, an integrated strip of 24 addressable RGB LEDs, and two G1/4 ports for your cooling pipes — that’s it, as far as I can tell.
“It is important to note that this monoblock requires the rest of the custom water-cooling loop to function, an ATX-standard Power Supply for power delivery, and an external RGB controller for the optional RGB LED effect,” writes EK Water Blocks.
So you’ll need your own radiator, pump, fans, tubes, interconnects, reservoir, power supply, and micro-ATX case, unless you’ve got one sitting around — the roughly $200 Raijintek Pan Slim you see here isn’t included, nor the perfect-fit metal bracket you see in EK’s photos and videos.
Oh, and you’ll need to disassemble literally your entire PS5, of course. Here’s the instruction video:
And it doesn’t work with every PS5, the company warns. There’s a list of compatible models on the company’s website. EK Water Blocks also recommends digital instead of disc PS5s since disc ones apparently require you to connect the disc drive every time you want to update the console.
If I haven’t scared you away yet… good? This sounds like a pretty cool (if really expensive) product that could let you create a particularly droolworthy PS5 in the right computer case. I’d love to see one in an open-air build where, say, the liquid cooling pipes themselves act as the “frame.”
Preorders are expected to start shipping in late October; the buy page currently suggests they’ll be delivered as soon as November 3rd, 2023.
