Noctua stuck its big brown desktop PC fans on an RTX 3080
Asus has teamed up with renowned fan manufacturer Noctua once again to make a large brown and tan graphics card that should pump out frames while staying relatively quiet. The two companies’ last collaboration was an RTX 3070, but now they’ve announced a decidedly enthusiast tier card: an RTX 3080.
According to Noctua’s press release, the card features two 120mm fans and a custom heatsink, making it “the quietest air-cooled graphics card in its class.” Apart from the fancy cooling, it’s a relatively standard Asus graphics card with two BIOS profiles, a backplate, and 10GB of GDDR6X RAM. There are 3080s with 12GB of memory, but that doesn’t seem to be an option with the Noctua heatsink.
The card will go on sale “starting early June 2022,” though whether you’ll be able to buy one is another question entirely, with chip shortages and stock wonkiness still plaguing the GPU market. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to compete with crypto miners for the card — like most Nvidia cards nowadays it’s a Lite Hash Rate model with reducing mining capabilities. Though, given that hackers have found a way around that, the bets may be off there.
There is one way the card isn’t quite standard: it is big. For one, Noctua’s “custom-engineered unified heatsink” is thicker than Asus’ standard one, according to a webpage breaking down its performance versus regular cards. It’s also got literal desktop fans in it: Noctua’s NF-A12x25 PWM model. This leads to it being around 3.25-inches thick, according to Asus’ spec sheet, almost an inch thicker than the company’s triple-fan Strix 3080. That means it’ll take up a whopping four slots in your PC — and still have a tiny bit of overhang into the next slot’s space.
For some people, that may not
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