PlayStation 5 Has a Huge Hidden Feature We All Missed

I’m going to be very upfront with you today, because there’s no point in hiding it from this point onwards: I’m not entirely sure how, but someone managed to get PlayStation 3 games to run on a PlayStation 5.

Uh, it’s sort of like a PlayStation 5 anyway. Let me try my best to explain.

You might have heard of the term “System-on-a-Chip” before, better known as an SoC. SoCs are an integrated circuit, and the likes of both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X contain one.

Basically they contain everything that a regular computer would contain, like a GPU and a CPU (among other things), but distilled down into a single chip.

The SoC featured in the PlayStation 5 was designed and manufactured by both Sony and AMD. If you have a base model PS5, this custom SoC is housed within it.

Usually, to get your hands on one of these SoCs, you’d have to buy a PlayStation 5 and rip it out. However, in recent years it was discovered that there’s a way to get your hands on one for about $50– and we have Bitcoin miners to thank for that.

As detailed in a video by Lowest Logan, these SoCs are featured in the AMD BC-250 Bitcoin mining rack. This brick-shaped rig was a result of a collaborative effort between Taiwanese manufacturer ASRock and AMD, as a way to offload some of AMD’s otherwise useless CPU cores and turn them into a product that could be sold.

Turns out, the AMD BC-250 houses the same SoC as the PlayStation 5, and Lowest Logan realised that (by doing some techno magic that I daren't even attempt to explain) you could morph it into a sort of PS5/Steam Deck hybrid.

So, why do you need to understand all of this setup? As Lowest Logan proved in their video, without modifying any of the hardware of the PS5 SoC, it was extremely easy to run PlayStation 3 games on it.

Do I recommend you buy one of these SoCs and attempt to do this yourself? Absolutely, 100% not.

That being said, it does essentially prove that Sony’s excuse about not being able to run PS3 games on the PS5 is rubbish.

If this fella can figure it out using the guts of a PS5 and the help from some dorks on Reddit, I’m pretty sure the billion dollar company Sony could have figured it out years ago… they just don’t want you playing PS3 games on it when you could be buying PS5 games instead.