Packaging

The Card

Even at a first glance, this card screams "Noctua." Both companies were wise to keep the brown color theme of the Noctua fans, though I'm sure a lot of people will hate on the design. For a first product, you need to grab the viewer's attention, and they've succeeded at that. On the back, you'll find a metal backplate with a cutout to let airflow through; here, the color theme is black with yellow/gold highlights.


Dimensions of the card are 31.0 x 14.5 cm, and it weighs 1578 g.


Installation requires four slots in your system. This is a really thick card due to the full-width fans. SLI is dead, so I'm not seeing any issues here space-wise.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.1. The DisplayPort 1.4a outputs support Display Stream Compression (DSC) 1.2a, which lets you connect 4K displays at 120 Hz and 8K displays at 60 Hz. Ampere can drive two 8K displays at 60 Hz with just one cable per display.

Ampere is the first GPU to support HDMI 2.1, which increases bandwidth to 48 Gbps to support higher resolutions, like 4K144 and 8K30, with a single cable. With DSC, this goes up to 4K240 and 8K120. NVIDIA's new NVENC/NVDEC video engine is optimized to handle video tasks with minimal CPU load. The highlight here is added support for AV1 decode. Just like on Turing, you may also decode MPEG-2, VC1, VP8, VP9, H.264, and H.265 natively, at up to 8K@12-bit.

The encoder is identical to Turing. It supports H.264, H.265 and lossless at up to 8K@10-bit.


ASUS includes a dual-BIOS feature with the Noctua card. The default BIOS is "quiet," and the "performance" BIOS will run a more aggressive fan curve that achieves lower temperatures at the cost of higher noise.


The card has two 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 375 W of power draw.


The GeForce RTX 3070 does not support SLI. Only the RTX 3090 does, and it has very limited SLI support.

Teardown

The first component that comes off is the cooler shroud, which really contains standard full-size NF-A12x25 120 mm fans. This makes it super easy to swap out the fans in the future, for different models or to replace a broken fan.


The heatsink uses five heatpipes to transport heat away from the GPU. The thermal pads on the memory are 2.0 mm thick.


Removing the cooler shroud wasn't as easy as I expected, reason being that it is glued to the heatsink, so it'll take additional force.


ASUS engineered the heatsink specifically for this Noctua card. It's a huge design that works very well. The pads for the VRM are 1.8 and 2.0 mm thick.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a small VRM heatsink becomes visible. The thermal pads here are 2.0 mm and 1.8 mm thick.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during handling and installation.