ASUS And Noctua Lay Claim To Quietest Air-Cooled GeForce RTX 4080 Super, Most Brown Too
In the early going, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 Super is proving to be a hot commodity, with many listings showing various SKUs as either sold out or on backorder just one day after releasing to retail. We'll see if things settle down, though one custom model that is likely to fly off store shelves just as quick is the upcoming ASUS GeForce RTX 4080 Super Noctua OC Edition.
As the name implies, ASUS and Noctua teamed up to design a custom-cooled variant that uses Noctua's trademark brown styling for the fans and cooling shroud. This will almost definitely be the most brown version of the GeForce RTX 4080 Super, though the distinct design language is not the only selling point. According to both ASUS an Noctua, it's also the quietest air-cooled graphics card in its class.
Noctua breaks it down in a blog post with a handful of graphs and a bunch of numbers. At full bore, the company says the card's 2,000 RPM fans only crank out 34.7 decibels of noise, compared to 48.6 dBA for standard 3,000 RPM fans. Even so, cooling is virtually the same—53.2C for the Noctua Edition model versus 53C for a model with standard fans.
Source: Noctua
That's with the fans running a maximum speed, mind you. At medium and low fan speeds, the card is even quieter, according to Noctua's figures (see the above graph).
"Like the previous Noctua Edition cards, the GeForce RTX 4080 [Super] model features a dual BIOS that enables customers to switch between a performance profile that provides the lowest GPU temperatures and a quiet profile that allows slightly higher temperatures in order to achieve the best possible acoustics. Catering to the demands of Noctua’s customers, the quiet profile is set as the default," Noctua explains.
Users can also tap into the ASUS GPU Tweak III software for finer grain control of the cooling characteristics, by way of configuring custom fan curves and/or undervolting. That's to say, it can be configured to run even quieter. To that end, however, the fans already switch off completely whenever the GPU is below 50C, so there where be instances where the card is dead silent. That will depend on your system's overall cooling, of course.
Beyond the fans, there was a lot of work put into the heasink design. In a blog post of its own, ASUS explains that its "own veteran thermal R&D team and the engineers at Noctua...worked tirelessly to tune the fin density and heat pipe arrangement of the heatink, optimizing it for the airflow characteristics of the NFV-A12x25" cooler.
Cooling and aesthetics aside, this a factory-overclocked model with a 2,610MHz boost clock in default mode, and slightly more aggressive 2,640MHz clock in OC mode. NVIDIA's reference blueprint calls for a 2,550MHz boost clock, so you're looking at a 60-90MHz factory overclock.
The ASUS GeForce RTX 4080 Super Noctua OC Edition will be available on February 8 (a week from today). Pricing for the custom card will be revealed later. In the meantime, it's working checking both blog posts from ASUS and Noctua, which go into quite a bit of detail about the design.
