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Late last year, ASUS and Noctua teamed up, slapping a beefy Noctua air cooler on an RTX 3070 graphics card. Now in 2022, the two companies are teaming up again, this time for a Noctua Edition RTX 3080 graphics card.
The Asus GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua Edition uses a massive 2.2-slot heatsink developed by the Asus thermal R&D team and the engineers at Noctua. The heatsink connects six heat pipes and a large heat spreader for the GPU die and its memory. As you may have noticed in earlier reviews of the RTX 3070 Noctua Edition, the heatsink is much larger than what you'll find on most other custom-cooled graphics cards, including ASUS's own ROG Strix series. With the cooler in place, the RTX 3080 Noctua Edition should be 4.1 slots thick, with NF-A12x25 fans handling airflow.
Speaking on the new ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua Edition, Noctua CEO, Roland Mossig, said: “The response on the first Noctua Edition graphics card was simply overwhelming, so we’ve been thrilled to continue our cooperation with ASUS. The RTX 3080 with its heat emission of up to 340 watts is an entirely different beast to tame than the RTX 3070, but by leveraging our fan technology and a customized heatsink, we have once again managed to create a card that combines serious GPU power with excellent quietness of operation.”
ASUS GM and VP, Kent Chien, added that this partnership delivers a “noise level breakthrough” for such a powerful graphics card, as well as “a visual style that you won't find anywhere else.
While the appearance of this card screams ‘Noctua', it’s loaded with many of the same ASUS features that you'll find on the company's other custom graphics cards. This includes a dual BIOS switch so you can choose between maximum performance or lower noise levels, and a 0 dB ambient cooling mode, so the fans won't spin up until they are needed. As Noctua points out in its performance comparison, at typical auto-speed fan settings, the RTX 3080 Noctua Edition runs 4.5 dB(A) quieter than the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 while achieving 3°C lower GPU temperatures and 14°C lower VRAM temperatures.
The ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua Edition will be available starting this month.
KitGuru Says: Would you like to see ASUS and Noctua releasing more graphics cards in the future?
