Almost every graphics card vendor makes an all bells and whistles version of a particular GPU. It might be one that’s heavily overclocked or one that follows a particular theme, but nearly all of them have a decent enough cooler to keep things well under control. Asus, on the other hand, might reckon it has them all beat because it’s teamed up with Noctua once more to create what possibly might be the coolest and quietest RTX 5080 you can buy.
Previous collaborations between the two companies created the likes of the GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua OC Edition, and for Nvidia’s last generation of GPUs, Asus and Noctua produced a very similar-looking RTX 4080 Noctua Edition. Sporting just two of the famous brown-and-beige fans, the cards were known for being very cool and quiet, albeit being seriously thick.
At this year’s Computex event, Asus proudly displayed its newest Noctua collab: a GeForce RTX 5080 with what must be one of the chonkiest coolers I’ve seen in a long time. That’s because it’s host to three Noctua fans, rather than the usual two.
Given that a normal RTX 5080 has a TGP (total graphics power) of 360 W, all those fans might seem sensible, but RTX 4080 isn’t that far behind, at 320 W. Asus’ RTX 5080 Noctua Edition does have a higher boost clock than the Founders Edition, though, running up to 2,730 MHz compared to the standard 2,617 MHz.
But that’s a mere 4% overclock, so perhaps it’s possible to squeeze even more out of the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition. After all, Dave, our hardware head honcho, managed to get over 500 MHz more out of an RTX 5080—an overclock of 40%!
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I have to say that while I’m a fan (pun sort of intended) of Noctua’s classic colour scheme, and I really liked the chunky look to the RTX 3070 Noctua card, I feel a bit disappointed with the new RTX 5080 Noctua Edition.
Sure, it’s about as thick a graphics card as you could ever want, requiring four slots in your chassis, but that brown shroud hides too much of Noctua’s lovely fans.
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The original Noctua Editions all have a gloriously cobbled-together affair to them, as if you’d strapped the luxury fans to the heatsink yourself. This new one just seems like any other Asus RTX 5080, just brown in colour, and that’s a real shame.
I reckon Asus and Noctua should make something truly spectacular, no matter how ridiculous or expensive it turns out to be.
High-end graphics cards are already priced into the realms of ridiculousness, so a quadruple or quintuple Noctua-equipped RTX 5090 would sell just as well as any other 5090. Mind you, it might be so chonky that you’d never fit one inside your PC without doing some serious metal work.
But that’s fine by me. Ultra-chunky, ultra-brown, ultra-beige. The perfect Noctua collab.
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