Asus teamed up with Noctua, but once more, to carry a particular brown-and-tan-themed model of the RTX 4080 to market. The 4080 already competes with the greatest graphics playing cards, albeit at a excessive value. We have now a pattern of the Noctua card in hand and will probably be reviewing it shortly, although we do not anticipate a large distinction from the vanilla RTX 4080 Founders Version when it comes to efficiency — the 4080 ranks fourth in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy in rasterization, and second in ray tracing. As a substitute, this card is all about aesthetics and, hopefully, relative silence.
Whereas the underlying {hardware} has undoubtedly modified fairly a bit, the brand new RTX 4080 Noctua OC Version seems to be almost the identical because the Asus RTX 3070 Noctua Version we reviewed final yr. Besides Asus apparently determined a quad-slot card wasn’t fairly giant sufficient, so the brand new RTX 4080 Noctua measures 310 x 145 x 87.5 mm, occupying 4.3 slots price of case area. It is a good factor most individuals do not plug in growth playing cards apart from a GPU as of late, as solely the underside slot or two on a typical ATX board would nonetheless be accessible with this card put in — although you might attempt for a PCIe riser answer.
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The entrance of the Asus field is nearly as non-descript as the cardboard itself, that includes a big clean space within the top-right. Possibly that is for future product quotes, through which case here is one: That is the most important, brownest graphics card we have ever reviewed! —Tom’s {Hardware}.
However significantly, you are both going to take a look at this card and suppose it is extremely boring, or you are going to love the minimalist brown-themed aesthetics. Even when the scale of the cardboard is something however “minimal.”
| Graphics Card | Asus RTX 4080 Noctua | RTX 4080 Founders Version |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | AD103 | AD103 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 76 | 76 |
| GPU Cores (Shaders) | 9728 | 9728 |
| Tensor Cores | 304 | 304 |
| Ray Tracing “Cores” | 76 | 76 |
| Enhance Clock (MHz) | 2625 | 2505 |
| VRAM Velocity (Gbps) | 22.4 | 22.4 |
| VRAM (GB) | 16 | 16 |
| VRAM Bus Width | 256 | 256 |
| L2 Cache | 64 | 64 |
| ROPs | 112 | 112 |
| TMUs | 304 | 304 |
| TFLOPS FP32 (Enhance) | 51.1 | 48.7 |
| TFLOPS FP16 (FP8) | 409 (817) | 390 (780) |
| Bandwidth (GBps) | 717 | 717 |
| TDP (watts) | 320 | 320 |
| Launch Date | Mar 2023 | Nov 2022 |
| Launch Worth | $1,649 | $1,199 |
As you’d anticipate, there’s just about no distinction within the uncooked specs for the Asus card in comparison with the Founders Version, apart from the clock speeds and the ensuing TFLOPS. Nvidia’s reference clock sits at 2,505 MHz for the RTX 4080, and the Noctua card (in OC mode) pushes that as much as 2,625 MHz. In principle that is a 4.8% enhance in GPU clocks, however we’ll must see how that performs out in follow.
Nvidia has been fairly conservative, as typical, with its rated clock speeds. Throughout our 15-game take a look at suite, for instance, the RTX 4080 Founders Version averaged between 2,720 MHz to as a lot as 2,820 MHz. We’ll must see simply how excessive the clocks run with the Asus Noctua card as soon as we get to testing, which ought to start shortly. We nonetheless do not anticipate an enormous distinction in graphics efficiency, although different elements like noise ranges will even be checked.
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The 2 giant Noctua NF-A12x25 followers dominate the entrance of the cardboard, as you’d anticipate. These are designed for good airflow and low noise ranges, and mixed with the vapor chamber and huge radiator we’ve got each purpose to anticipate good ends in the temperature and noise testing outcomes.
Naturally, the entire different elements of the Nvidia Ada Lovelace structure are current, together with help for DLSS 3. I can say that I’ve opted to allow DLSS 3 whereas taking part in Hogwarts Legacy, simply because it permits me to max out all of the settings at 4K whereas nonetheless working at greater than 60 fps. That is utilizing DLSS High quality mode upscaling as nicely, so excessive upscaling components may additional enhance efficiency (at the price of some visible constancy). I am nonetheless not satisfied the 50–80 % increased framerates that end result actually really feel considerably quicker, although the sport definitely seems to be smoother.
As you may in all probability guess, the Asus RTX 4080 Noctua OC Version does not come low cost. Nvidia’s baseline value sits at $1,199, and Asus’ high fashions usually carry a hefty premium. The official MSRP for the 4080 Noctua OC sits at $1,649, almost 40% above the baseline fashions. And you’ll find many RTX 4080 playing cards beginning proper close to MSRP, with this MSI RTX 4080 Ventus 3X OC (opens in new tab) really promoting for $8 beneath MSRP.
If the Noctua is simply too wealthy to your blood, Asus additionally gives the RTX 4080 TUF Gaming for $1,199 (opens in new tab), and Amazon has the RTX 4080 TUF Gaming OC (opens in new tab) for a similar value. The bottom mannequin RTX 4080 ROG Strix in the meantime goes for $1,459 at Newegg (opens in new tab), whereas the RTX 4080 ROG Strix OC prices $1,474 at Amazon (opens in new tab). Lastly, there’s the 4080 ROG Strix White for $1,599 at B&H (opens in new tab). The Strix OC playing cards do have a better 2,655 MHz enhance clock in comparison with the Noctua model, although that final 30 MHz is not more likely to matter a lot.
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Once more, it is a massive card, simply dwarfing the RTX 4080 Founders Version. The RTX 4080 Noctua playing cards have been introduced and will go on sale at the moment, although these are more likely to be restricted runs and thus comparatively uncommon. Taking a look at eBay for instance, over the previous 90 days solely 5 RTX 3070 Noctua playing cards have been offered, in comparison with 182 RTX 3070 Strix playing cards. That does not inherently imply Asus manufactures over 35 occasions as many Strix playing cards as Noctua playing cards for the 3070, but it surely definitely implies discovering the Noctua playing cards will probably be harder.