PS5 Overheating? Why It Happens and How to Fix It
By Riki Baker · Updated 23 July 2026
The short answer: try the free fixes before you pay anyone. Most overheating PS5s are choked with dust or boxed in with nowhere to breathe, and that costs nothing to put right. Then check your rights, because they last longer than most people think. Only if it is clean, well ventilated and still shutting down are you looking at the cooling itself, and that is the point where a workbench beats a vacuum.
Is it actually overheating, or just loud?
Worth separating these, because one of them is not a fault at all. A PS5 that gets louder when a big game loads is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and Sony's own support page says as much: the fan temporarily working harder is normal. Irritating in a quiet room, but not a problem.
The pattern that matters looks different. It is the fan roaring on the dashboard with nothing running. It is the case hot rather than warm around the vents. It is a warning on screen telling you the console is too hot. And above all it is shutdowns mid-game that were once a year, then once a month, then twice in a weekend.
A PS5 that shuts down mid-game is not breaking. It is protecting itself, and it is asking to be cleaned. What you do over the next few weeks decides whether it stays a cleaning job.
What can you fix yourself, for nothing?
Start here. A good number of the consoles people are ready to give up on only ever needed the first two, and none of this costs a penny or affects your guarantee.
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Give it 10cm on every side
Sony's safety guide asks for at least 10cm of clearance, and the detail people miss is that it means every side, not just behind. You will find guides telling you four inches from the wall, which is not the same instruction. Most PS5s we see live in a TV unit with a door on it, quietly breathing their own exhaust.
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Get it off the carpet
The same guide specifically warns against a rug or carpet with long fibres. The feet sink, the intake underneath is throttled, and the fibres feed a steady supply of fluff into the console. A hard shelf beats a bedroom floor every time.
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Clear the dust you can reach
The faceplates lift off without tools. Behind them are the dust ports along the edges, and a vacuum held near them lifts the worst of it. Do not jam a nozzle inside, and do not spin the fan with compressed air, which can damage it.
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Blame July, not just the console
A console that was fine for two years and started cutting out this month has probably not developed a fault this month. A PS5 in a south-facing room in a heatwave is fighting an ambient temperature it never sees in January, which is why our console bench fills up every summer.
The clearance and carpet instructions come straight from Sony's PS5 safety guide, checked 23 July 2026. Give it a fortnight. If the shutdowns stop, that was your answer and you owe nobody anything.
Before you pay anyone, what are your rights?
Ask this before you get a quote from us or anybody else, because the answer is occasionally free. Your claim under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 is against the retailer who sold you the console, not Sony, and in England and Wales you have up to six years to bring one.
Read that carefully, though, because plenty of sites overstate it. Six years is the window for making a claim, not a six-year warranty. For the first six months the retailer has to show the fault was not there when you bought it. After that the burden flips to you, and proving a thermal fault was inherent in a three-year-old console you have played most evenings is a genuinely hard argument. It still costs nothing to ask.
One myth worth killing while we are here: overheating does not void your guarantee. Sony's guarantee terms contain no dust or overheating exclusion. What they do contain is a clause about damage caused by not following the instructions on proper use and maintenance, which is how a console choked solid with dust can be refused. That is a refusal on the cause rather than the symptom, and the difference matters if you are being told otherwise.
What happens if you send it to Sony?
Something most people do not expect, and it is worth knowing before you post your console anywhere. Out of warranty, Sony does not repair your PS5. Its own support pages describe an exchange service: you send the faulty console, and a refurbished one comes back.
Read the guarantee terms alongside that and the picture sharpens. The console you send becomes Sony's property, so your machine is not coming home. And the process involves reformatting the drive, with no liability accepted for lost data. If your saves are not in PS Plus cloud storage, treat them as gone.
For plenty of people that is still a fair trade. If your console has an intermittent fault nobody can pin down, a known-good replacement has real appeal. Just go in knowing it is a swap, not a fix, and back up anything you care about first.
Sony does not publish a price, so you request a quote. For context only, UK owners were reporting around £240 for a PS5 exchange in 2022 and 2023. We could not find a reliable current figure, and we would rather say so than have you plan around a four-year-old number.
Does standing your PS5 up cause this?
You have probably read that it does. The honest answer has two halves, and one of them goes against our own interests.
The scary version was withdrawn
The viral claim that upright consoles leak liquid metal did not survive scrutiny. The consoles involved had already been opened for repair, with the heatsink moved and Sony's containment disturbed. They were not sealed retail machines.
But it is not nothing either
iFixit's liquid metal guide notes the compound can spread unevenly, especially where a console has stood upright for long periods. That matches the pattern we tend to see when we open them.
So we are not going to tell you that standing a PS5 up will kill it. Sony supports both orientations and sells the stand, thousands of consoles stand upright for years without trouble, and we would be selling you a fix for a problem the evidence does not clearly support. What we will say is that if yours runs hot, has a few years on it and has spent all of them upright, that is worth weighing rather than dismissing. And if you have no strong feelings about how it looks under the telly, lay it flat. It costs you nothing.
Clean, ventilated and still cutting out?
Then you have reached the fault nobody gives a straight answer about. You have fixed how air moves around the console. You have not touched how heat leaves the chip, and that is a different system entirely.
Between the PS5's processor and its heatsink sits a thin layer of liquid metal rather than the paste you would find in a PC. It moves heat far better, which is how a console this powerful fits in a case this size. It does not stay perfect forever. Over years it can degrade and spread unevenly, and once part of the chip has a poor thermal path the console throttles, then shuts down. It is also not a kitchen-table job: reaching it means going down to the board, and liquid metal conducts electricity, so a smear in the wrong place is far worse than the fault you started with.
What we do about it
We strip the console to the board, deep-clean the fan, heatsink and vents properly, and apply fresh liquid metal between the processor and the heatsink. It goes back together, gets tested under load, and comes back quiet. On the PS5 family that is our Deep Clean & Liquid Metal Repair, a flat £86. Unlike an exchange, it is your console that comes back, with your games and saves still on it.
The diagnostic is free and there is no obligation. If we open it up and the real fault turns out to be something else, a failed HDMI port at £126 say, or stick drift in a controller at £24, you hear about it before we touch anything and you get it in writing. No fix, no fee, and 12 months of warranty on the work.
PS5 overheating: your questions answered
What are the signs of a failing PS5?
There is a difference between a console under strain and a console in trouble. Strain is a fan that spins up during a demanding game and settles down afterwards, which Sony says is normal and by design. The signs worth acting on are the fan roaring at full speed even on the dashboard, the case hot rather than warm around the vents, an on-screen warning that the console is too hot, and shutdowns mid-game that get more frequent over the weeks. Repeated shutdowns are the clearest signal, because that is the console protecting itself rather than a random glitch.
Does overheating void my PS5 warranty?
Not by itself, and the pages telling you it does are wrong. Sony's guarantee text contains no dust or overheating exclusion. What it does contain is a clause covering damage caused by not following the instructions on proper use and maintenance, and Sony's safety guide does explicitly tell you not to let dust build up around the vents. So a console refused at claim is refused on the cause, meaning a badly neglected machine, not on the symptom of running hot. Lifting the faceplates is not in itself a void either.
Will Sony repair my PS5 if it is out of warranty?
Not exactly, and this catches people out. Sony's out-of-warranty offering is described on its own support pages as an exchange service: you send your faulty console and a refurbished one comes back. Under the guarantee terms the console you send becomes Sony's property, so your own machine is not returned, and the process involves reformatting the drive with no liability accepted for lost data. If your saves are not in PS Plus cloud storage, assume they are gone. Sony does not publish a price for it, so you have to request a quote.
Is it better to keep a PS5 vertical or horizontal?
Sony supports both, sells an official vertical stand, and states no orientation preference for cooling. You may have read that standing a PS5 up makes liquid metal leak: that story was retracted, because the consoles involved had already been opened for repair with the heatsink moved and the containment disturbed, rather than being sealed retail machines. Where it honestly stands is this. iFixit's own liquid metal guide notes the compound can spread unevenly, especially where a console has stood upright for long periods, and that matches the pattern we tend to see when we open them. It is not a reason to panic if yours stands up. If you have no strong preference, flat is what we would choose.
Why does my PS5 still overheat after I have cleaned it?
Because cleaning fixes how air moves around the console, not how heat gets off the chip in the first place. The PS5 uses liquid metal rather than thermal paste between the processor and the heatsink, and over years that layer can degrade and spread unevenly, leaving part of the chip with a poor thermal path. The symptom is a console that is spotless, well ventilated and still throttling or shutting down under load. That is the one you cannot reach with a vacuum.
My PS5 is three years old. Do I have any rights left?
Possibly, and it is worth checking before you pay anybody. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 your claim is against the retailer who sold you the console rather than Sony, and in England and Wales you have up to six years to bring one. Read that carefully though, because it is a limitation period for making a claim, not a six-year warranty. After the first six months the burden is on you to show the fault was inherent rather than wear or neglect, which is a hard argument on a well-used console. It still costs nothing to ask the retailer first.
The bottom line
Room to breathe, off the carpet, dust cleared. That is free, and it fixes a great many overheating PS5s, especially the ones quietly living behind a cabinet door.
If it is clean, well ventilated and still shutting down, stop rearranging the shelf. That is the cooling itself, it is fixable, and it costs a lot less than a new console.