Introduction

ASUS and Noctua are easily two of the most recognizable and respective brands in the PC component industry, with decades of presence. Back in 2021, ASUS reached out to Noctua to start 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. In today’s review we’re covering the ASUS RTX 4080 Noctua OC, which is the company’s third ASUS x Noctua graphics card after the RTX 3080 Noctua (May 2022) and RTX 3070 Noctua (Oct 2021). Noctua established total dominance over first-party air cooling solutions for graphics cards with these two cards, and its expertise in air cooling assumes even more significance with high-end graphics cards from this generation, with typical board power values well above the 350-400 W mark, and most other brands relying on 4-slot coolers for high-end GPUs.

The GeForce RTX 4080 is NVIDIA’s second fastest graphics card from the RTX 40-series “Ada” generation. For gamers, the card offers pretty much the same use-case as the flagship RTX 4090—to plow through any of today’s games at 4K Ultra HD resolution with maxed out settings, including ray tracing. You can take advantage of the revolutionary DLSS 3 feature judiciously to nearly double up your frame-rates in supported games. The RTX 4090 only holds an upper hand in gaming + creator use-cases, where its large 24 GB memory comes through. The RTX 4080 still has 16 GB to play around with, which is plenty for 4K gaming.

The GeForce “Ada Lovelace” graphics architecture introduces the third generation of RTX, the revolutionary gaming graphics innovation from NVIDIA that sees the combination of conventional raster 3D graphics with certain real-time ray traced elements, to significantly increase realism. The 3rd generation RTX has generational performance improvements that allow game developers to add even more ray traced content to their games; as well as a couple of more ray traced effects that get low-level hardware-acceleration from the new 3rd Gen RT cores. “Ada” also introduces 4th Gen Tensor cores along with support for new data formats; and the new Optical Flow Accelerator component that enables DLSS 3, a performance enhancement that uses AI to draw entire frames without involving the main graphics rendering machinery, interleaving them with rendered frames.

The GeForce RTX 4080 is based on the 5 nm AD103 silicon, NVIDIA’s second-largest silicon from the GeForce “Ada” generation. The RTX 4080 nearly maxes out this silicon, by enabling 76 out of 80 streaming multiprocessors (SM), which work out to 9,728 out of 10,240 CUDA cores being enabled, besides 304 out of 320 Tensor cores. You also get 76 RT cores, 304 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. The RTX 4080 is endowed with 16 GB of 21 Gbps GDDR6X memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. This may seem narrow compared to the 320-bit or 384-bit interfaces the RTX 3080 shipped with, but with “Ada,” NVIDIA has redesigned the memory sub-system with a design focus on larger on-die caches, which speed things up on the silicon, reduring round-trips to the memory, and conserving memory bandwidth utilization.

Noctua’s cooling solution features two massive aluminium fin-stacks tailor-made for this GPU, to which is drawn from a vapor-chamber plate is fed using 8 mm-thick copper heatpipes. A pair of NF-A12x25 (120 mm, 25 mm-thick) hydro dynamic bearing fans with high static pressure, ventilate this heatsink. The design aims to maximize cooling performance and GPU Boost headroom, while also striving to be the quietest RTX 4080 graphics card that money can buy—quieter than even liquid-cooled ones. We believe Noctua’s claim because its last rodeo with ASUS graphics cards offered a jaw-dropping combination of performance and low-noise.

The ASUS RTX 4080 Noctua OC in today’s review is based on the company’s TUF Gaming RTX 4080 OC, using the same PCB design and clock speeds. The rated boost has been increased from the 2505 MHz NVIDIA Founders Edition baseline to 2595 MHz, a 90 MHz increase or 3.6%. In terms of pricing ASUS is asking for $1650, which is a massive $450 increase over the $1200 MSRP for RTX 4080. In this review we find out if the $450 premium—which can buy you a DIY liquid cooling kit—is worth the expense.