This is my tenth GeForce RTX 4080 review, and this time I get to cover a very special card. As most of you know I love working with quiet PC components, and the ASUS RTX 4080 Noctua should be perfect for that. In late 2021, ASUS and Noctua teamed up to start a collaboration that combined the ASUS expertise in graphics card manufacturing with the awesome tech of Noctua's fans. The first result was the RTX 3070 Noctua which confirmed that such an approach can work. A bit later, in May 2022, they released the RTX 3080 Noctua, to expand into the high-end segment. People have been speculating about the ASUS/Noctua project ever since GeForce 40 was announced and at CES, both companies announced the ASUS GeForce RTX 4080 Noctua, which I've looked at in this review.

Visually the RTX 4080 Noctua looks identical to the RTX 3080 Noctua, there's some small changes on the backplate cutouts, but that's about it. A lot has been talked about the looks of Noctua products and the opinions cover the whole spectrum from "ugly" to "beautiful." What's undisputed though is that Noctua found a unique color theme that clearly identifies any product as "Noctua"—without any doubt, in the blink of an eye. ASUS was smart to keep that color theme, because it instantly validates their product, because for cooling "Noctua = best" in the mind of many people. Pair that with a sentiment "ASUS = best" for graphics cards, and you've got a winner on your hands.

GeForce RTX 4080 is designed occupy the space below the RTX 4090 in the company's product stack, at a price point of $1200, but still offering performance higher than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. While the GeForce RTX 3080 used the same GA102 GPU as the RTX 3090/3090 Ti, NVIDIA has changed that approach with the GeForce 40 series. We now get a new GPU chip called "AD103" that sits between AD104 and AD102, which gives the company more flexibility to combat AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT/XTX offerings. AD103 comes with a much smaller die size than AD102, 379 mm² vs 608 mm² which makes it cheaper to produce—an important capability, because AMD is betting on chiplets with Navi 31, considerably strengthening their position.

On the RTX 4080, NVIDIA has enabled 9,728 out of 10,752 GPU cores available in the silicon. The number of ROPs is 112, there's 304 TMUs and 76 ray tracing cores. The memory capacity has been increased to 16 GB, up from 10 GB on the RTX 3080, to better handle today's complex workloads. Memory bus width is now only 256-bit, whereas the RTX 3080 has 320-bit. Technically this is a step backwards, because memory bandwidth is now 717 GB/s (760 GB/s on the RTX 3080), despite the higher VRAM clock frequencies, but this difference is probably compensated for by the MUCH bigger L2 cache (64 MB vs 5 MB).

ASUS has given their Noctua OC a factory overclock, to a rated boost clock of 2595 MHz, which is a 90 MHz increase over the NVIDIA FE speeds—not exactly a lot. This increase matches the ASUS TUF OC specs exactly, whereas the STRIX offers a +120 MHz increase. Averaged over all the 25 games in our GPU test suite at 4K resolution, we find the ASUS card 18% faster than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti—last generation's $2000 flagship card—very impressive. Compared to the GeForce RTX 3080, the gen-over-gen performance uplift is a a massive 51%. The current-gen flagship, the RTX 4090 is an impressive 24% faster though. AMD's new Radeon RX 7900 XTX roughly matches the ASUS card, the RX 7900 XT is 15% slower.

RTX 4080 excels at gaming in 4K. Pretty much all the titles in our test suite ran at more than 60 FPS—at max settings. While RTX 4090 was really designed just for 4K, I feel like RTX 4080 will be a pretty amazing option for 1440p gaming, too. If you can afford it, it will achieve astonishing framerates at that resolution, so you can drive a 144 Hz+ monitor with ease—without having to sacrifice any details. For 1080p gaming the RTX 4080 really is too fast and ends up CPU-limited fairly often, so I wouldn't recommend it for that, because it's just too expensive, rather, buy a decent monitor first and then look at GPU choices.

NVIDIA is betting big on ray tracing with GeForce RTX 4080. Their new Ada architecture comes with several improvements to run RT faster and more efficiently, and adoption rates in games are getting better and better. AMD's Radeon RX 7900 Series can't match the ray tracing performance of NVIDIA's Ada-architecture offerings, so if you believe ray tracing is the future, then your buying choice should bias slightly towards NVIDIA, but the differences are not huge. RTX 4080 is roughly 20% faster than RX 7900 XTX in ray tracing on average, with big differences depending on the game and its actual RT implementation.

While most high-end graphics cards are based on a triple-fan design, ASUS opted for just two fans, but big ones, using the 120 mm form factor. Actually, these are standard Noctua NF-A12x25 fans, which you could easily swap out, they use the standard 4-pin connector. One drawback of using full-size fans is that they are relatively thick, especially when compared to what we're usually seeing on graphics cards. This means that the heatsink has to be thinner, which in turn means less cooling capability. To help with that, ASUS has installed a vapor-chamber on the base of the cooler, which sucks up heat from the GPU quickly. Under the hood, the PCB and VRM design used is identical to that of the ASUS RTX 4080 TUF. Noise levels of the ASUS RTX 4080 Noctua are really good, even at the default "Performance" BIOS setting. We measured 27.9 dBA, which is quieter than most other RTX 4080s that I've tested. 27.9 dBA is certainly "very quiet," but I feel like that's not enough to justify the price of the card, especially when you have the PNY RTX 4080 OC reaching 26.1 dBA, at a price close to $1200.

Things get interesting once you switch to the "quiet" BIOS. Now the card runs at an unbelievable 23.6 dBA, under full load, while pushing out more than 60 FPS at 4K. It's not easy to imagine how quiet that is. I'm testing in a quiet neighborhood with all other computers shut off and no running fans or AC—dead quiet—and the card is still almost inaudible. Basically, you have to stand next to the system on an open bench and concentrate on the card to somewhat discern its noise. As soon as you start moving, your clothes will make enough noise to overpower what little sound the card puts out—absolutely incredible! Even at those noise levels the temperatures are still good, reaching 71°C. As expected from all modern graphics cards, the fans will stop completely in idle, desktop work, video playback and light gaming.

Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test confirms that the ASUS Noctua heatsink with eight heatpipes is a really good design that tops our charts. However, the differences are really small. The MSI RTX 4080 Suprim actually ends up slightly better in that test, and the ASUS STRIX is really close, too. These results prove that there is no magic here, the heatsink is excellent, but other companies could build something comparable, it's not impossible. The ASUS RTX 4080 Noctua isn't just a good heatsink though, it also has good fan settings that are optimized for low noise levels. What's also very important is that the GPU is running close to its maximum efficiency point, with reasonable clock/power and voltage settings. While other cards run at higher voltage and power limit to eke out the last bits of performance from RTX 4080, ASUS focused on efficiency with their card, which makes perfect sense. Even knowing that, I still have to complain about the manual power limit adjustment range. While the default of 320 W, which matches the FE and most other cards, is a sensible choice, limiting the maximum power to 352 W is not. 352 W is actually slightly lower than the 355 W maximum on the Founders Edition; the STRIX goes up to 420 W, and Zotac allows up to 450 W on their AMP Extreme. A more generous power limit range would make the card an interesting choice for overclockers, because the great cooler could easily absorb another 100 W in heat output, and it would still be really quiet.

Generally, RTX 4080 is a super efficient design, thanks to the 5 nanometer TSMC process and clever engineering by NVIDIA. This makes the GPU the most energy-efficient GPU ever built. Energy efficiency not only helps with your power bill, but it's also the magic bullet to reduce GPU temperature and noise levels. Despite the factory OC, the ASUS Noctua card loses only 5% in efficiency, which means its matches RTX 4090 efficiency pretty much exactly. Compared to AMD's offerings the RTX 4080 offers slightly better efficiency than the RX 7900 XT/XTX, and is much more efficient than previous generation cards from both AMD and NVIDIA.

In this review we've tested NVIDIA's new DLSS 3 frame-generation capability, and I have to say I'm impressed. At first I was highly sceptical and thought it would be like the soap opera interpolation effect on TVs, but no, it works REALLY well. The algorithm takes two frames, measures how things have moved in those two frames and calculates an intermediate frame in which these things moved only half the distance. While this approach is definitely not problem-free, especially when pixel-peeping at stills or slowed down video, in real-time it's nearly impossible to notice any difference. As you run at higher FPS and resolution it becomes even more difficult because the deltas between each frame are getting smaller and smaller. I also feel like we're only seeing the beginning of this technology, and there will be numerous improvements in the future. Adoption rates should be good, because implementing DLSS 3 frame generation is very easy if you already have DLSS 2 support in your game. Another interesting NVIDIA Tech is "Reflex," which reduces the total gaming latency, so you see things earlier on your screen and can react faster, to get more kills or survive for longer.

If you've read so far, I'm sure you're excited for the RTX 4080 Noctua—now the bad news. According to ASUS the RTX 4080 Noctua OC comes at an MSRP of $1650. Yup, you've read that right, ASUS wants $450 over the $1200 MSRP for their new card. That's a 38% increase! Considering that the regular RTX 4080 TUF is available in-stock right now for $1200, you're basically paying that much for an improved heatsink and two $30 fans. No doubt, Noctua isn't giving their name for free, and since this is probably a very small production run, it won't be easy for ASUS to recoup their initial investment. But still, at that price point the card is more expensive than the RTX 4090 MSRP of $1600, for which stock has replenished recently and cards are available starting at $1650. For the vast majority of gamers a $1650 RTX 4090 is a much better choice than any $1650 RTX 4080, because it offers considerably better performance. But there's also the low-noise crowd that this card is designed for. This group of people is used to paying premiums for low-noise components and many of them have deep pockets. Being able to buy a quiet graphics card that achieves 60 FPS at 4K in virtually every title was a dream just a few years ago, and that's without DLSS 2 or DLSS 3. It's really impressive what ASUS has achieved here, and I still find it difficult to justify the $1650 price point. How about $1400? Sure, at $1400 if I was in the market for a 4080 I would definitely feel tempted. There's also several decent custom-designs available from other vendors that might not be just as quiet, but "quiet enough," at a much more affordable price point. No doubt, there's lots of people who want the best and can afford it, but the problem is that these people now have to pick between RTX 4090 (best performance) and RTX 4080 Noctua (best noise).

(Despite the amazing noise levels and good cooler, the card missed Editor's Choice just barely, because of the high price, low power limit and small factory OC, so I gave our 2nd highest award "Recommended")