Protects your stuff from EM radiation and stuff, but is this really a concern in e.g. a PlayStation 2? Are they a relic from the past? Is there any proof of them harming electronics?
In: Technology
If they could get away without the RF shields they would have. A lot of things in electronics involve switching power on and off very quickly. For example the processor and graphics chip is constantly switching at its clock frequency in order to do calculations. So for every clock tick there is a huge power draw. Modern more powerful processors have even bigger power spikes. The current going through the wires like this makes the wires act like antennas.
And if you think about processor clock speeds they might often end up in the 2.4GHz range which is used for WiFi and Bluetooth. I have seen laptops with inadequate RF shielding lose WiFi signal at specific processor loads. And while most processors can not get up to the 5GHz band there are harmonics which can disrupt even this band. And then you have the new 6GHz band used by WiFi6 where other harmonics can reach. And then you have cell phones which use a number of frequency bands like 600MHz, 900MHz, 1.7GHz, 4.7GHz, and up. If your electronics is not shielded it will disrupt traffic on these bands.
It also goes the other way around. If your cell phone receives a call and therefore outputs a lot of radiation, something you might have heard through poorly shielded speaker cables. Then this signal will get picked up by the wires to the processor and if there is some harmony with the clock frequency it may disrupt the processor, most likely causing it to crash.
Every home electronics device is tested. They put it inside a chamber that blocks any RF interference from the outside. And then they test how much radiation it puts out on all frequencies. If it is lower then the legal requirements it passes. And then they test it while bombarding it with radiation at various frequencies and check if the device fails in any way. If the device is passes this test the engineers go inn and remove some of the shielding trying to make it cheaper to manufacture, and then they redo the test. They want to get away with as little shielding as possible. But usually they need extra radiation shielding between the processor, graphics card, WiFi module and power supply as these can interfere with each other due to their close proximity. But the engineers also have to take into account that people may leave their phone on the device or even connected to the USB port to change. So they need proper RF shields to the environment.
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