Product Review: OIVO PS5 Cooling Station
Is there anything quite as sweet as getting your gaming setup exactly how you want it? Consoles positioned just so, lighting set exactly right, and all your nerdy accessories placed in the perfect eye-catching spots. There’s plenty of products out there that offer you ways to spruce up your man cave, and I recently took out an OIVO PS5 cooling station for a spin to see how it held up.
Designed to work with all versions of the PS5, the OIVO cooling station itself is a pretty sleek looking piece of kit; it stands about an inch and a half high and feels relatively lightweight. The black base comes with two attachable white fins that, once clipped in, offer the same clean aesthetic as the PS5 itself. There are grooves built into the base to make it easy to fit your console into the right place, and a chunky screw to help you fix the machine and the cooling station together – handy if you’re ever rooting around behind your console and are worried about knocking it over. Once you’ve got the wings on and have the big boy strapped in, getting the cooling station going requires nothing more than plugging in the USB at the back of your machine and voila!
The build quality obviously isn’t going to rival the console itself, but it certainly has a good feel to it. The unit doesn’t feel flimsy or fragile, the underskin buttons are well lit and responsive, and the cooling fans are whisper quiet, even on the highest setting. The RGB lighting is set into tramline trim running down each side of the unit, offering an understated look in comparison to some of the more garish offerings. You can flick through nine different colours, or choose to have the unit cycle through all the available colours if you can’t decide which one you want. You can also toggle how bright the lighting is, allowing you to turn the look up or down to fit your aesthetic.
Now, do PS5’s actually need additional cooling? The general consensus seems to say ‘no’. But if you’re concerned about your big boy getting a little too hot under the collar, the OIVO station is equipped with multi speed fans to push cool air up into the console from the underside. You can flick between high, medium, and low speeds at the touch of a button, or you can choose to turn the functionality off altogether. There’s also an ‘auto’ mode that seemingly adjusts the speed up and down on its own to meet the needs of your machine, but since the cooling station doesn’t include any probes or thermometers to place inside your console, I’ll admit I’m sceptical about the fidelity of this functionality.
OIVO PS5 Cooling Station
A more definitively useful feature of the station is the pair of controller charging ports. Designed as a pair of shaped recesses housing USB-C connectors, you can easily keep two DualSense controllers juiced up by turning them on their head and pushing them firmly into place. Once in, the connection is snug, and while I’m a little concerned about scratching the top of my controllers trying to fit them exactly onto the charger, I feel like the recesses do offer some assistance ‘guiding you in’ in that regard. (As well as helping make sure you lift the controller out appropriately, lessening the chance of damaging the connector and potentially snapping it off inside your DualSense.)
Impressively, the USB-C charging connectors are fixed on a small sliding mount that you can click back and forth, offering versatile positioning to fit either the standard DualSense controller, or the more pricey DualSense Edge. This feels like the sort of astute design choice that would often be overlooked, leaving customers disgruntled when they open their new toy and realise that their shiny controller won’t even fit in their new charger.
The final feature is a handy detachable hook that slips snugly over the outer panel of your PS5 and gives you a sturdy place to hang your headset. The hook itself is thicc, and maybe looks a touch out of place in comparison to the sleekness of the rest of the unit, but you honestly won’t notice once your headset is hung up on it and it should hold up even the chunkiest of headsets!
All in all, the OIVO cooling station is a pretty well made accessory, designed to combat a problem that only may or may not exist. But if you’re convinced that your console needs a little extra love and attention, you could do worse than this one: the RGB trim is slick, the controller chargers are sturdy, and overall, it’s a good looking way to keep all of your kit together.
In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with this product in order to conduct this review.
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