Introduction

ASUS and Noctua are easily two of the most respectable brands in the PC component industry. Back in 2021, the company started a collaboration that brought Noctua’s expertise in designing high-quality cooling solutions, including fans, and the ASUS wizardry at building top-notch graphics cards together. I’ve reviewed the ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua OC in October 2021, was impressed, and begged ASUS for more. Today, that wish comes true, and I have the honor of reviewing the ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua OC.

It appears that things went well with the RTX 3070 Noctua, and the two companies thus decided on their next project—the RTX 3080, which makes total sense. The card offers performance a tier higher than the RTX 3070 and comes at a higher selling point, which absorbs some of the cost of the new cooler design.

Based on the 8 nm “GA102” silicon, the GeForce RTX 3080 more than doubles the number of unified shaders over the previous-generation RTX 2080. It packs 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, and 272 Tensor cores. The memory amount has been increased by 25%, to 10 GB, as has the memory bus width, to 320-bit. NVIDIA and Micron Technology have innovated a whole new memory standard for the GeForce 30 Series, which they call GDDR6X. This memory operates at a data rate of 19 Gbps and has NVIDIA hit memory bandwidth levels of 760 GB/s.

ASUS designed a custom cooling solution for the RTX 3080 Noctua and paired it with the battle-tested PCB design of the RTX 3080 TUF. Physically, this big card takes up four slots, which shouldn’t be a problem considering SLI is dead and nearly all people only have one PCIe card installed—the graphics card. In terms of clocks, the ASUS Noctua comes with a small bump in boost clocks, up to 1785 MHz from the NVIDIA baseline frequency of 1710 MHz. ASUS promised to send us pricing for the RTX 3080 Noctua last week, but we’re still waiting for that update. Until then, we’re estimating a price point of $1,100 for the RTX 3080 Noctua, $200 above the current price of the RTX 3080.