If the recent console cycle is anything to go by, the PlayStation 4 will be a major part of living rooms for at least seven years. We've been playing around with the Sony's next-gen console for the better part of a week now, including nearly two full days with the benefit of the crucial firmware 1.5 update that activates many of the system's features. (This review builds on our initial impressions of the system from before that update, which you may want to read before continuing.)

Admittedly, two days is not really much time to get a complete feel for the PS4. But then again, it won't be the same system in 2020 that it is right now. Take the outgoing PlayStation 3—it's a far cry from the fat, buggy, compelling-game-free console it was at launch in 2006.

In any case, Sony's newest system clearly shows the company's desire to start over from scratch after kludging feature after feature on the aging PS3 over the years. The result is somewhat of a mixed bag, complete with brilliant new features, major interface tweaks (for good and ill), long overdue fixes, and some new problems to replace the old ones. As a piece of consumer hardware designed to be the center of a living room entertainment center for nearly a decade, the PS4 is off to a decent start. However, it's going to need some updates.

Hardware design

We discussed this a little bit in our first-day impressions, but we're big fans of the PS4's rather sleek, unique case design. The slanted, lightly accented form really stands out in an entertainment center, coming off as nothing so much as a black monolith that magically plays games and apps on your TV. The design does come at a slight cost to functionality though, as the top back corner of the system creates a sort of lip over the rear ports. This makes them a little harder to access when reaching around from the front or sides. Luckily, most users will simply plug in an HDMI cable and a power cord and be done with this annoyance forever. (You can even use the cables currently hooked up to your PS3 if you're moving that out.)

PS4 power usage Standby mode 10W Standby mode (with download) 70W Idle on menu 89-91W Idle w/ disc in drive 93-96W Blu-ray 93-96W Netflix 93W Game installation 108W-116W Gaming (Resogun) 130-139W Gaming (Killzone) 144W-151W Charging controller Add 4 watts

The system is also surprisingly light given its physical size: at only 6.1 pounds, it's not even half as heavy as the PS3 was when it launched in 2006, and it's only a tad weightier than the 4.6-pound, Super Slim redesign of Sony's last system. It's not a stat that's likely to mean much to people who are just going to plop it in an entertainment center, but for anyone who takes their system traveling, the PS4 feels remarkably portable. If this is the starting point, we can't wait to see how much smaller and sleeker the PS4 gets in inevitable redesigns.

Electrically, the PS4 draws about 150 watts of power when playing a high-end game like Killzone, a number that drops to 130 or 140 watts when playing less intensive titles like Resogun. That's better than the roughly 180 watts of the launch edition of the PlayStation 3, but it's worse than the 100-or-so watt maximum in more recent redesigns. (Update: This story originally mis-stated the PS4's power consumption in standby mode as 70 Watts. This is only the case when the system is downloading something while in standby. Ars regrets the error).

After a few hours of play, the top of the PS4 gets noticeably warm but not hot to the touch, especially on the matte-finished right side. The rear of the system is even hotter, with almost all the cooling exhaust seeming to come out of the system in a slight breeze that's noticeable if you're reaching back to adjust a cable. There were some reports of overheating and failing consoles even before release, but our test unit hasn't run into any existential problems so far, save for freezing once when the Internet connection coincidentally crapped out at the same time that Netflix was loading. A hard reset fixed everything right up.

Even at maximum heat dissipation, the PS4 is much quieter than its predecessors. It's not outright silent, but from across the room the system produces a faint, low-level hum that's much less noticeable than the tiny jet engine whine of my launch-era PS3. The PS4 gets a little louder when a disc is spinning, but since all games run directly from the hard drive, this is really only an issue when watching disc-based movies. As I write this, I notice the gentle fan whir of my 2010 MacBook Air much more than I notice any noise coming from the PS4 running a game.

Hardware power

We've already taken some deep dives into how the PS4's specs measure up on paper, but for gaming systems, the proof is in what you see on the screen rather than in architecture or benchmarks. While the PS4 does bring a noticeable jump over the last generation of consoles, the apparent increase is not as breathtaking as I would have expected given the seven-year gap since the PS3 came out.

Don't get me wrong—games look unquestionably better on the PS4 than any other console that has yet been released (look for more direct comparisons to Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One when we review that system next week). On multiplatform games that cross the generations, the most noticeable difference is in the lighting effects.

When lightning crashes on an open ocean in Assassin's Creed IV, for instance, the reflected light rolls around the contours of the human characters and bounces off the raindrops on their skin much more believably in the PS4 version of the game. You might notice a ray of light reflecting off dust particles in the air much more clearly, too. In general, everything just looks a bit shinier than it did on previous consoles, creating a pretty distinct aesthetic to all the games I've tried so far when compared to previous consoles.

There are other apparent benefits from the jump to the PS4, like more abundant and natural smoke effects, more faithfully rendered textures, and characters and objects that have a bit more detail in their polygonal shape (this is especially apparent in natural objects like trees). There is a slight increase in overall sharpness that's somewhat noticeable in certain games, but the titles that are able to handle 60 frames per second had the more noticeable improvement to my eyes. Everything looked a bit hyper-real to eyes that are used to the 30 FPS console standard.

All that said, well, the difference between a late-stage PS3 game and an early-stage PS4 game just doesn't have the same "wow factor" as previous generational console leaps. Think about the first time you saw the colors and huge characters of the Genesis after years with the NES, or the first time you saw the more natural, less-blocky-looking 3D characters of SSX on the PS2, or the first time you saw a game running on an HDTV through the Xbox 360 or PS3.

The graphical leap this time around is definitely noticeable, but it's not even close to these kind of epochal transitions of the past. And if you've been able to play a PC game at its highest settings in the last year or two, you're already used to seeing graphics that are slightly better than those on display in this launch lineup. For the time being, at least, we seem to have reached an extreme point of diminishing returns as far as the apparent effect of that ever-increasing console power. Not no returns, mind you, but definitely diminished returns.