Packaging

The Card

Even at a first glance, this card screams "Noctua." Both companies were wise to keep the tan-and-brown color theme of the Noctua brand on the fans, although I'm sure a lot of people will hate on the color. Visually, the card looks nearly identical to the RTX 3070 Noctua I reviewed October last year, which is fine. On the back, you'll find a metal backplate with a cutout to let airflow through; here, the color theme is black with yellow and gold highlights.


Dimensions of the card are 31.0 x 14.5 cm, and it weighs 1,845 g.


Installation requires four PCIe slots of space 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 includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4, and two HDMI 2.1.


The card has two 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 375 W of power draw. This area also houses the dual BIOS switch, which lets you switch from the default "quiet" BIOS to a "performance" BIOS with a more aggressive fan curve. As we'll see later in our testing, there's no reason to switch to the other BIOS as operating temperatures are excellent even with the quiet BIOS.


The GeForce RTX 3080 does not support SLI.

Teardown

The ASUS thermal solution, which is stronger than the one on the RTX 3070 Noctua, uses six heatpipes and a large heatsink to keep the card cool. VRMs and memory chips are cooled by the main heatsink,too.


The fans are standard full-size NF-A12x25 120 mm fans. This makes swapping out the fans in the future for different models or replacing a broken fan incredibly easy; they even use standard 4-pin connectors.


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