Asus teamed up with Noctua again to release the ASUS RTX 3080 Noctua OC Edition 10GB. After the RTX 3070, the two brands are tackling the next GPU from Nvidia, released originally in september 2020.
Cooled by two well-known NF-A12x25 and a humongous 82.6mm (4.1 slot) cooler, it is the thickest RTX 3080. Even the enormous GIGABYTE RTX 3080 Extreme sits at “only” 70mm thickness. An interesting note, the RTX 3070 Noctua Edition is apparently bigger than the 3080 according to Asus’ specs at 4.3 slot.
Just like they did with the RTX 3070, the heatsink is also tailored especially for this model by both Asus and Noctua. It is based on the 3080 TUF heatsink, with a larger finstack for better heat dissipation. Another modification is on the coldplate. Asus was separating the main copper base for the core and the heatsinks for the memory modules. The Noctua Edition uses a unified copper base to contact all of the above at once, improving Vram temperatures. More infos about the design can be found here.
In terms of specs, the RTX 3080 Noctua Edition is a 10GB Vram model with 8704 Cuda cores and the a 320-bits memory interface. Asus does offer a slight factory overclock with a boost frequency of 1785mhz and 1815mhz in OC mode. The Founders Edition RTX 3080 10GB only has a 1710mhz boost clock.
Asus put 3 DisplayPort 1.4a and 2 HDMI 2.1 ports. Although it is one more than the Founders, the maximum amount of displays possible at once is limited to 4 by Nvidia drivers (as it is for the entire GeForce lineup).
Asus also recommends an 850w power supply and only uses two 8pin PCIe power connectors. This recommendation is a bit overkill as most people get away with good quality units even for overclocked models. The only time this 850w would make sense is if you are using a high power draw CPU in production/multi-threaded workloads where the CPU can exceed 200w of power draw by itself for longer periods.
The card is said to launch early June. However the pricing is still unknown at the time of writing.
