Introduction

ASUS and Noctua are easily two of the most respectable brands in the PC components industry. The two came up with a wacky and unlikely area of collaboration—ASUS's expertise at making graphics cards and Noctua's mastery with air cooling solutions of all shapes and sizes. The result is the ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua OC. This graphics card combines an overclocked ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 PCB with a custom air-based thermal solution that's cooled by two Noctua NF-A12x25 120 mm fans.



Why ASUS and Noctua chose to collaborate on the GeForce RTX 3070 as opposed to the newer RTX 3070 Ti, more powerful RTX 3080 or something from the AMD camp, such as the super-efficient RX 6800, has something to do with supply. The RTX 3070 remains a successful middle-of-the-market SKU by NVIDIA. This is the newer LHR (lite hash-rate) stepping, which comes with half the cryptocurrency mining performance of the original RTX 3070.

The RTX 3070 retains its performance outlook when it comes to gaming—it beats the previous-generation flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti, which means maxed out gaming with RTX-on at 1440p, or even 4K UHD with fairly high settings. It is based on the 8 nm "GA104" silicon and endowed with 5,888 out of 6,144 CUDA cores on the silicon. It also gets 184 third-generation Tensor cores and 46 second-generation RT cores. The memory configuration is unchanged from the previous-gen RTX 2070—8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 across a 256-bit wide memory interface.

The GeForce RTX 3070 is based on NVIDIA's "Ampere" graphics architecture, which heralds the second generation of the company's path-breaking RTX real-time ray tracing technology. It combines 2nd Gen RT cores that double the ray intersection performance over the previous generation, adding hardware acceleration for more effects, such as ray traced motion blur, and 3rd Gen Tensor cores, which leverage the sparsity phenomenon in AI deep-learning neural networks to increase inference performance by an order of magnitude.

The ASUS RTX 3070 Noctua OC, as we mentioned earlier, features a custom-design cooling solution designed in collaboration with the Austrian company. It features an extremely thick compound aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a pair of large 120 mm Noctua fans that have been extensively tuned by the company to prioritize low noise above all. The card is a whopping four slots thick. This shouldn't be too much of a problem given multi-GPU is dead. Only those with SFF or Mini-ITX builds may not find this card suitable. The card is positioned at an MSRP of $830, but given current market conditions, we expect the card will retail for $950 at least, possibly more than $1000.