Last year, Asus and Noctua had come up with an RTX 3070. The graphics card was called the Asus GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua Edition. It focused less on RGB and more on industrial-grade Noctua fans and thermal performance. After the reception of the original RTX 3070 card, Asus and Noctua are coming up with an RTX 3080 variant of the same.
The RTX 3070 Noctua edition card was very well received. It easily was one of the best performing RTX 3070 cards, with Asus’ high-end PCB and Noctua’s top-of-the-line cooling. But, the card could not fully utilize what Noctua had to offer because the RTX 3070 is not the hottest running GPU available in the market. It comes with GDDR6 memory, a standard that is not difficult to cool. Thus, the RTX 3080 Noctua edition will be a testimony for both Asus and Noctua.
The new card packs the same GA102 processor available on every other RTX 3080 on the market. This means 8704 CUDA cores to cool, and 10 extremely hot running GDDR6X memory chips to handle. These make cooling an RTX 3080 much more difficult as compared to the RTX 3070. Thus, Noctua has completely revamped its formula.
This new card will use the quad-slot cooling system we saw on the RTX 3070 variant. They will be equipped with massive Noctua-built A12x25 120mm fans. These fans are much quieter than the ones Asus packs with the TUF Gaming RTX 3080, while at the same time resulting in cooler GPU temperatures. The VRAM temperatures were also 14℃ cooler than those recorded with the TUF gaming variant.
The only drawback of the RTX 3070 Noctua Edition was the stupendous price the card asked for. Following that route, we have no information on the pricing of the RTX 3080 to date. But, we do not expect it to be cheaper or even close to that of the TUF Gaming model. The premium Asus asks for this high-end model is not justified, and thus the RTX 3070 cards did not sell well. We are expecting a similar fate for the RTX 3080 variant too.
