ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua OC

[W1zzard]

Now all the others can start making cards like that

No doubt, various board partners have been asking me lots of questions recently
Ultimately this will be good for us

 

[Yttersta]

WTF lol :-D That's barely louder than a quiet room with very competitive temperatures in the quiet mode! Amazing. Too bad they released this so late, I'd have loved a couple of these in our computers at home.

 

[mechtech]

hmmmm I'm only into quin-slot coolers now. Quad slot coolers are sooo last year

 

[konga]

This style of cooler design (big fans, comparatively smaller heatsinks) is the future of air-cooled high-end GPUs. It's just so much better than using small, low-profile fans blowing against monstrously thick heatsinks. I feel like inertia in the manufacturing process has led to some highly inefficient cooler designs for the 3090 Ti, and I hope that's not going to continue with the 4090. If you're going to be doing 3.5 - 4 slot designs at all, then this is the way.

By the way, you say you need 4 free slots. Can you confirm if you can put a card into slot #5? (a low-profile one such as an nvme adapter)

 

[Ravenmaster]

A whole extra 2fps in Cyberpunk2077 at 4K... yeah... nah. Think i'll stick with my good looking card that is quiet enough.

 

[Assimilator]

Huge, heavy, ugly, expensive, unnecessary. It may be novel but it sure as shit isn't innovative. Not sure why anyone would bother buying this when they can get an FE and waterblock.

 

[claes]

I can think of 300 reasons or so

 

[progste]

Huge, heavy, ugly, expensive, unnecessary. It may be novel but it sure as shit isn't innovative. Not sure why anyone would bother buying this when they can get an FE and waterblock.

Because liquid cooling requires maintenance, this will run pretty much the same for 10+ years.

 

[MarsM4N]

The biggest problem with coil whine is reproducing and measuring it. It not only depends on the card, but also on the PSU. The biggest factor is the FPS rate. The higher, the more coil whine, also depends on the actual FPS rate to find resonance.

Any ideas how to test this?

CS:GO @1280x720 (or any low demanding game that pushes 500+FPS)+ a PSU with really bad ripple (Corasir RM1000 might be a good candidiate) + a Spectrum Analyzer App

Just test through some of the worst PSU's you can find.

 

[W1zzard]

CS:GO @1280x720 (or any low demanding game that pushes 500+FPS)+ a PSU with really bad ripple (Corasir RM1000 might be a good candidiate) + a Spectrum Analyzer App

Just test through some of the worst PSU's you can find.

But is it fair to report that "all cards have coil noise", but only with this worst case setup, and as soon as you buy decent stuff, or dont play a game with 500 FPS it goes away?

 

[MarsM4N]

But is it fair to report that "all cards have coil noise", but only with this worst case setup, and as soon as you buy decent stuff, or dont play a game with 500 FPS it goes away?

Well, to my understanding a PSU with high ripple is just a "turbo charger" for coil whine.

But saying "all GPU's have coil whine" is not very accurate. There are GPU lineups with very low complain rates & others where people flushing reviews with bad reps.
I guess another big factor is how much power is pushed trough the coils (stress). A heavily overclocked GPU with a underprovisioned power phase & lower quality coils will be more prone to coil whine.

 

[wolf]

Love what Noctua is doing here, this card embodies what people seek to achieve with deshrouding but from the factory, especially since it seems like my TUF 3080 deshrouded with 2x120mm fans seems so exceptionally close to how this cards thermal and acoustic performance is.

I'd love to see Arctic get back in the game making GPU coolers, especially if they did factory cards like this. They had the quite successful accelero series, make a new series but use the full size P12's and you've got a winner imo

 

[mama]

Lot of cheaper 3080s out there...

 

[milewski1015]

Lot of cheaper 3080s out there...

Sure, that's why Wiz listed "Pricing unknown, probably quite expensive" in the cons column. The target audience for a card like this is likely someone that wants to purchase an air-cooled card that is as quiet as possible.

 

[SteveJK88]

The biggest problem with coil whine is reproducing and measuring it. It not only depends on the card, but also on the PSU. The biggest factor is the FPS rate. The higher, the more coil whine, also depends on the actual FPS rate to find resonance.

Any ideas how to test this?

I've tested those RX 6900 XT on:
- 3 motherboards (X570 Gigabyte Gaming X | B550i Gigabyte Aorus Pro AX | B550 MSI MAG Tomahawk)
- 3 different CPUs (2x 5600X | 1x 3400G)
- 3 different PSUs (Fractal Design ION+ 860W | be quiet! Straight Power 11 1000W | Corsair HX850W)
- 2 different houses (230V) with and without UPS protection (APC Back-UPS Pro 1200 S | BR1200SI)
- 2 different monitors (BenQ MOBIUZ EX3415R UWQHD 144Hz | Samsung Odyssey G5-G55T UWQHD 165Hz)

SAME-EFFIN-COIL WHINE.

Then, at last, I've started tweaking the max GPU clock speed and I've started to see a pattern (thanks to the glorious GPU-Z): the lower the Watts needed, the lower the coil whine.
I've been using "The Forest" as a test-game because it easily triggered the noise from the cards:
- Downvolting the GPU did not affect coil whine.
- Lowering the Max power to -10% from the AMD Software did not affect coil whine.
- Then, when I started lowering the max boost clock, the noise got reduced. When I've set it to the reference 2250 MHz, the noise got low (but still present). The point was not the GPU clock, but the power needed. The more I was closer to the 200W, the more silent got the coil whine.

Hummm...
Check for coil whine with unlimited FPS, 60, 120 and 144 FPS.

60 - 144 - 240 - unlimited FPS on a 240Hz monitor should be better.

60 is for "i don't care" gamers.
144 is for "so my eyes can see past 60FPS" gamers.
240 is for "pro" gamers.
∞ is for "I can see anything" gamers.

But still, coil whine should be tested against resolution too.

I guess the best catch should be the Samsung Odissey G9-G95T.
With the resolution of 5120x1440p (~7.4MP) is almost dense as a 4K (~8.3MP).
It runs @240Hz with FreeSync and G-Sync.

EDIT:
or the new Odyssey Neo G8 32-inch 4K 240Hz

but then he would have to test with different PSUs and maybe even with 230 and 120 volt...

Good call about the 120V.

Guess the test should implement the best quality PSU available like the Seasonic Prime Ultra Titanium 850 W used in the review.
Then, IF there's coil whine, test the card with other two high-quality PSUs, but just running one test. If the coil whine is the same, there's no need to repeat all the iterations.

Yes, it's a hell of a job. I know.

At least add the info in the noise part of the reviews. "In this particular test setup, the card (did't/) suffered from coil whine".
That should help.

 

[beedoo]

Fantastic product! How about coil whine?
I've tried 5 (five) 6900 XTs (3x Sapphire Nitro+, Powercolor Red Devil Ultimate, MSI Gaming Z Trio) and all have serious coil whine noise.
Report on coil whine should be very useful in the noise section of every review.

Interesting. I have a Liquid Devil 6900XT and no coil whine there...

 

[eidairaman1]

Huge, heavy, ugly, expensive, unnecessary. It may be novel but it sure as shit isn't innovative. Not sure why anyone would bother buying this when they can get an FE and waterblock.

Heck you can get a monoblock from Alphacool for these AIB cards.

Brown makes it look like dookey.

4 slots wasted too.

Next.

 

[Bradeh]

Watercooling is still incredibly niche and won't be mainstream anytime soon, to dismiss this to say go water doesn't help the majority of buyers. The point should be that manufactures should provide better aircooling design rather then providing subpar solutions.

 

[chrcoluk]

Not sure I agree with a 4 slot GPU not been a problem for space I hope thi sis not the start of a new trend, but interesting to see noctua fans combined with a gpu officially supported.

Huge, heavy, ugly, expensive, unnecessary. It may be novel but it sure as shit isn't innovative. Not sure why anyone would bother buying this when they can get an FE and waterblock.

Ultimately when it comes down to it you right, however interesting it may be to have noctua fans on this, still no way worth the premium over an FE card, and the slot size of the thing is ridiculous.

 

[PapaTaipei]

I wonder how much of a difference it would have made by using all copper on the fins and pipes.

 

[Mussels]

If this card existed when i was GPU hunting, i'd probably have gone straight for it.


Those noise levels just make everything else look bad.

 

[MarsM4N]

If this card existed when i was GPU hunting, i'd probably have gone straight for it.
Those noise levels just make everything else look bad.

Agree, it makes all other Nvidia cards look bad. The first & only Nvidia card to rech below 30 dBA.

Meanwhile: stock RX 6900 XT: 27.1 dBA & RX 6800 XT: 27.4 dBA

 

[W1zzard]

Review has been updated with the $950 MSRP provided by ASUS

 

[Cowboystrekk]

Impressive! I would consider a chromax black variant! My dream would be standardized heatsinks on most GPUs so we could attach the fans we prefer! RGB, high performance etc.

Agree, it makes all other Nvidia cards look bad. The first & only Nvidia card to rech below 30 dBA.

Meanwhile: stock RX 6900 XT: 27.1 dBA & RX 6800 XT: 27.4 dBA

Hey, the TUF with silentbios comes close atleast It is interestning to see how much better good fans perform vs stock GPU-fans. We saw the same on the 3070 Noctua review, heatsink etc is close to the TUF-edition, with TUF doing 28dB at 62C, while Noctua did 26dB at 60C.

 

[madshi]

Thx W1zzard for testing cards like this. Great stuff for those of us who love silent parts. I sure hope Asus will release the same cooling solution for 40xx cards.