SCRY Artic PlayStation 5 Cooler Kickstarter Hands-On Impressions

I don’t know about where you live, but here in Texas we are suffering temperatures above 110 degrees lately. With no end in sight, and our power company asking us to raise the temperatures in our house, you might be feeling the heat a bit. If your consoles are feeling the heat as well, I might have a solution for you. A company named SCRY has developed an easily-attached cooling assist device called the SCRY Artic PlayStation 5 Cooler. You can guess which console it’s for, but it’s kinda right there in the name, isn’t it? Let’s talk about what this device does.

A simple device, the SCRY Artic snaps onto the back of your PS5 giving you six additional fans to pull heat away from the console to keep it cool, shunting away any excess heat. It does so without taking up any of your precious USB ports (something its competitors fail to do), and without adding a ton of noise to the equation.

The device itself is meant to seamlessly blend into the rear of your PlayStation. Two tabs slide upwards into the back of the fin structure of the console. The SuperSpeed USB port that provides power to the device snaps into the PS5, and finally the bottom smaller tabs lock onto the case. It sits comfortably and securely at this point. No wires, no additional configuration, no hassle. How do you know it’s ready to go? Well, it has RGB of course!

The six fans on the rear of the device, three large and three small, light up when the SCRY Artic is installed correctly. When the console is turned on, these come to life, giving you a soft bluish-white glow from each fan via the LEDs in each of them.

You might be wondering why you need such a thing, or you might recall that these sorts of devices burned up Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s not too long ago. Well, unfortunately the PlayStation 5, as wonderfully designed as it is, has overheating problems. iFixIt has a guide for opening the device and cleaning it to try to prevent this issue. Threads from just two months ago on Reddit show players having overheating problems while playing Final Fantasy 16, though that’s hardly the first time. Add in record-setting heat levels day after day and you might find that you need something like this.

Snapping the device onto the console is a breeze, as the brief instructions suggest. Powering on the device, the fans spring to life. At 10,000 RPMs I was concerned about the sound, but the copper-jacketed coil and magnet design surrounded by fluid film that SCRY is calling “Hyperfluid” are not only fast, but cool. They dissipate enough air to throw an attached streamer almost parallel to the console! Amazingly, it does so having only added less than 3db of noise to the overall package.

The lamella design (which is to say, the thin strips running vertically to break up the air flow) and the side vents, keep the air moving away from the console cleanly without adding any restrictions. Other air handling systems like this in the past have had a problem with this, often creating a heat coffin that ended up constricting air flow rather than drawing it away – no such problem here. Better still, the device isn’t impeded by being vertical or horizontal. In fact, it also fits the disc and digital version of the system without an issue.

I wish I had an expensive thermal camera to confirm the claims that SCRY is making with the Artic, but alas the best I can use is my handheld thermal measuring device. Even still, the measurements I’ve pulled show the surface temperatures of the console before and after application, so I can at least reliably measure the delta. From what I can see, after about 5 minutes of God of War, the system’s metal internal surfaces that I can reach with the laser are around 65 to 70C. That’s toasty, but well within spec. Applying the cooler dropped the temperature between 10 and 15 degrees. Since heat is the enemy of electronics, this is an interesting result, if not as conclusive as I’d like given that I don’t have the proper tools. Still, it backs the claims that SCRY is putting forth in their Kickstarter.

And yes – this device is a prototype on Kickstarter. The price for jumping in at this point is $29.99, a steal given that the MSRP is expected to be $59.99 at launch. You won’t have to wait long for it either – they are expected to ship in October of this year, and just in time for the holidays.

It’s hard to trust a product like the SCRY Artic after having been burned by other coolers in the past, but by every measure I can think of, they are doing all the right things. They are showing their homework of how and where they are measuring both internally and externally, and the science and tooling behind their approach is sound. This sounds like an easy recommendation, but you’ll want to move quickly – while they easily surpassed their initial funding request (by more than 7X and climbing at this point!), the Kickstarter campaign ends in 19 days and you’ll end up paying more if you wait!

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