Maybe in the original model they where cooling the system beyond what it was needed, being generous to make sure they didn't have any related issue with this. These months they may have collected data from users, which added to the one they already had, maybe allowed them to reduce cooling related costs and reduce part of the cooling itself while still keeping it in a more than fair safe zone.
Fair enough point, but should they not have already collected this data before launch? I get that with things being connected online these days you can do stuff like system updates, patches etc. that weren't possible before without a lot of physical media and brick & mortar involvement.
But IMO something like this shouldn't have what seemingly amounts to purchasing customers acting as QA beta testers providing data the company would've needed to collect internally through elaborate internal simulations/tests.
Doesn't RDNA2 throttle at something like 110c or whatever?
In suitable conditions yeah. I think Austin implying a throttle situation at 53 degree Celsius was ridiculous tbh; even if the system had absolutely terrible cooling (which it doesn't), it'd need to hit a lot higher than that to begin throttling, though in such a case throttle point would occur before its max rated temperature limit, for sure.
Fan diameter is not the only aspect of measuring size or effectivity of a fan.
Design communicating something doesn't improve the cooling, and both consoles have a chunk of heatsink.
Like always loads of BS without any substance.
No substance? Okay let me communicate this with an analogy. Let's call it a thought experiment, and look at hurricanes & tornadoes. As you can probably guess, we'd be comparing the PS5 to the hurricane and the Series X to the tornado.
Hurricanes have their strongest winds just around the eye wall and a bit beyond that, but otherwise they generate weaker winds the further you go out. If you look at the PS5's layout, the fan is located in one specific quadrant, so while the heat pipe helps with spreading the generated wind (air) throughout the system, the most wind (air) is going to be where the fan is at, and it's the components located there that are going to be the most actively cooled.
While hurricanes have a rising air component similar to tornadoes (and in a hurricane's case, cooler winds that flow away from them at upper levels to allow more warm air to rise), it's also worth noting that the eye of hurricanes are generally within the center. Again, this is just a basic analogy and the cooling of these consoles aren't literal recreations of natural storms, but if we take this analog here, the PS5's fan (which would be the eye) is absolutely not within the center, so if you have that "air rising", it's not in a matter of even distribution.
The same thing is theoretically true with tornadoes, but the way winds work here are different on some levels. They have warmer air that rises upward through the sinking colder air, which causes an updraft, which increases winds when there are variations in direction or speed of the winds. The Series X's setup mimics this on an idealistic level, with the fan drawing up heat to expel it through the exhaust vents at the top. Both the heat sink and separating metal chassis act as ways to funnel the heat generated from the components upwards through the vortex of the fan's suction, which have an effect (slightly) analogous to the aforementioned variations of wind speed and direction in tornado funnels.
If you keep all that in mind, there is also the fact that between the two, hurricanes generate lesser peak winds than the most capable of tornadoes, but the tradeoff being that they have winds which affect a lot more surface area at a single given time. This is a reason why the Series X has its components arranged the way it does: to maximize coverage of components, using an updraft mechanization generated through fan suction.
I'm not arguing which system has a superior or inferior cooling setup here, just merely illustrating that in analogous terms they take two different approaches and it helps to understand how winds are actually generated and applied in the analogies (hurricanes, tornadoes) the two systems take their inspiration from at a most basic level. Yes they both have chunks for fans, but the fans are arranged and placed differently, and configured differently in relation to the rest of the assembly. Not only that, but they are two different brands of fans, of different sizes, and likely different RPM settings, applied voltages, and mechanism design for their fan blades, so you can't just dwittle it down to something as simple as "Well you can't argue if the cooling implementation is worst on Y because X and Y have pretty large fans.".
As I just showed, this is definitely not just about fan size, you are right on that part. But, it's not just conjecture of BS being reached at to go alongside this, either. I'm backing everything being mentioned here with substance, it's your choice to make of that what you will.