Summarization
Like its brother, the RTX 3070, the ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua Edition is an exceptionally quiet video card that’s really suitable for lovers of silence who don’t want to compromise on cooling performance. The additional cost of this silence is significant and will be more suitable for the 12 GB version of the RTX 3080. However, anyone who puts silence first, will be interested in it anyway.
After the success of the RTX 3070 Noctua Edition, ASUS and Noctua decided in their collaboration to launch a luxury card according to this concept. Not entirely surprising, this is the RTX 3080 Noctua version and once again everything has been done in the design to keep noise production to a minimum. You can read what the result is in this review.
This is not the first time we have discussed a video card from ASUS and Noctua. Released earlier this year Our review of the ASUS RTX 3070 Noctua Edition† The RTX 3070 scored the best in our audio test, and the cooling efficiency was found to be very high in our benchmark. So we were very excited about the card and concluded our conclusion by commenting that ASUS and Noctua could release more high-end models according to this recipe. And here’s a new RTX 3080 showing up in our test lab.
The similarities with the RTX 3070 Noctua Edition are quite significant. For example, the two manufacturers again chose the TUF Gaming card as the basis, on which a much larger cooling block is placed, equipped with two huge 120mm Noctua fans. The cooling assembly has been developed to work together as efficiently as possible with the two fans, while reducing noise production. The fan used is the NF-A12x25, a high-quality fan that was developed over four years ago. Most video cards have fans that are fairly flat to keep card size limited. This varies with Noctua versions. The space there is sacrificed to accommodate the traditional fan’s thickness of 2.5 cm.
Although Noctua’s versions of the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080 are very similar, there are differences. Of course, the GPU used varies, and to handle the higher power consumption of the GA102 chip and GDDR6X memory, the RTX 3080 Noctua Edition is equipped with a more capable cooling block with six heatpipes, compared to five in the RTX 3070. As a result, the card is about 250 grams heavier than its brother . In addition to cooling the GPU itself, the core board of the cooler connects to the memory chips and the power supply on the printed circuit board, by heat pads† The thickness of the card has remained the same, which is still quite severe compared to the usual dimensions with just over four slots.
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