After early first sightings in Japan, the new CUH-1200 series PlayStation 4 - or C-Chassis - is now starting to circulate UK stores. With little fanfare from Sony to mark its arrival, the console bears several noteworthy changes over earlier PS4 models. Its physical design gets some choice tweaks, but reports of lowered noise levels also point to it addressing one of the console's longest running bugbears. But is the improvement really that radical, and if so, is it worth upgrading if you've already committed to an earlier model?
Before we start, the new CUH-1200 C-Chassis model brings some curious physical changes. Gone is the PS4's glossy panel, and the new revision gives us a uniformly matte surface on top - a material less prone to dust and scratches build-up. Smart, depressible buttons also now feature at the front, with power and eject switches protruding by a millimetre. These give a satisfying, tactile click, replacing the last model's more sensitive capacitive buttons. Running down its centre is also a new LED assembly, a shorter strip of light that doesn't stretch as far across as the launch model's. Conversely, the new model's LED is brighter, and by comparison shows up better in daylight conditions.
Internally there's been some shifting around too. Rather than using 16 modules of 512mb GDDR5 RAM (tallying up the console's full 8GB of memory), we now have eight bigger clusters of 1GB. As a consequence of halving the modules, space is freed up on the opposite side of the motherboard, and energy efficiency should be greatly improved as a result - something borne out in our later tests. Added to this, we have a slightly thicker 500GB HDD in the new console - a Samsung Spinpoint drive that's swapped from the thinner HGST drive in our original PS4. The PS4's power supply unit is also replaced with a lighter, lower output model, in part contributing to the C-Chassis' lower 2.5kg weight - 300g lighter than the launch model.
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