What Are The Holes Under Your PS5 Covers For?

Like any machine, consoles need to be maintained to ensure they're in optimal condition. From time to time, that means cleaning out your system of dust, debris, and other nasties. Believe it or not, the PlayStation 5, and all game consoles, deserve this treatment. However, disassembling a console is not usually as intuitive as opening the side of a desktop tower case, for example. The good news is Sony has considered this and designed the console with all of that in mind. If you pop off the cover of your PS5, you're left with a matte black shell — but you'll also notice what appears to be haphazardly placed holes in various places on that shell.

Those holes might look random, but they have a very specific purpose. The holes are there to let you vacuum and clean out dust inside the console without requiring you to open it up further. Yes, it's truly that simple. Of course, the console holes are quite a bit different from the holes on the back of PS5 controllers. Those are functional reset buttons, not for vacuuming.

To access the PS5's vacuum holes, if you never have before, the steps are to remove the stand, then remove the faceplates and vacuum away. iFixit has an excellent visual guide if you need one, and the teardown site notes that you might need a flathead screwdriver or a coin if your PS5 is attached to its stand in the vertical position. You may want to have a pair of tweezers handy to snag any stuck dust bunnies, and you'll definitely want to make sure the console is unplugged from power. If you want to be extra safe, you might want to grab an affordable tool to help prevent electrostatic discharges.

The general dirtiness of your console is going to depend on a lot of factors, like whether the room or conditions are dusty, if you have pets, if there are carpets or rugs, whether you smoke inside, how exposed it is to airflow, or even the sun and heat. That said, it's good practice to clean out your console and any PCs you own every three to six months. If you are in an environment that's prone to more dust buildup, cleaning more often wouldn't hurt. It's also good to clean more regularly if you're a heavy-duty player, meaning if you use your console every day for long hours.

At the very least, you should be cleaning out your enclosed systems annually. Depending on how old your console is, you may also have to reapply the PS5's liquid metal or thermal paste, which is a fairly simple task, though it involves a lot of technical knowledge to disassemble the console. If you already have the console open, there's a cheap and easy upgrade you can do if you're running out of storage space: Replace the solid-state drive (SSD) with a larger one.

Altogether, even if you're not doing any major upgrades or disassembly, you should get in the habit of cleaning out your console regularly. It will run better when you play, and should theoretically last longer since it's clean and running optimally.