Introduction

ASUS and Noctua are easily two of the most respectable brands in the PC component industry. Back in 2021, the company started a collaboration that brought Noctua's expertise in designing high-quality cooling solutions, including fans, and the ASUS wizardry at building top-notch graphics cards together. I've reviewed the ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua OC in October 2021, was impressed, and begged ASUS for more. Today, that wish comes true, and I have the honor of reviewing the ASUS GeForce RTX 3080 Noctua OC.



It appears that things went well with the RTX 3070 Noctua, and the two companies thus decided on their next project—the RTX 3080, which makes total sense. The card offers performance a tier higher than the RTX 3070 and comes at a higher selling point, which absorbs some of the cost of the new cooler design.

Based on the 8 nm "GA102" silicon, the GeForce RTX 3080 more than doubles the number of unified shaders over the previous-generation RTX 2080. It packs 8,704 CUDA cores, 68 RT cores, and 272 Tensor cores. The memory amount has been increased by 25%, to 10 GB, as has the memory bus width, to 320-bit. NVIDIA and Micron Technology have innovated a whole new memory standard for the GeForce 30 Series, which they call GDDR6X. This memory operates at a data rate of 19 Gbps and has NVIDIA hit memory bandwidth levels of 760 GB/s.

ASUS designed a custom cooling solution for the RTX 3080 Noctua and paired it with the battle-tested PCB design of the RTX 3080 TUF. Physically, this big card takes up four slots, which shouldn't be a problem considering SLI is dead and nearly all people only have one PCIe card installed—the graphics card. In terms of clocks, the ASUS Noctua comes with a small bump in boost clocks, up to 1785 MHz from the NVIDIA baseline frequency of 1710 MHz. According to ASUS, the retail price of the RTX 3080 Noctua OC will be $950, quite a reasonable incresae over the $900 price point the RTX 3080 currently sells for.

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.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).

Circuit Board (PCB) Analysis

The ASUS RTX 3080 TUF Gaming OC uses a pair of UPI uP9512R 8-phase VRM controllers, which put out a 16-phase VRM for the GPU.


ASUS is using Vishay Siliconix SiC654 DrMOS components for the GPU VRM, which are rated for 50 A.


The memory power is a 4-phase setup managed by a uP9512S controller.


For memory, the same Vishay SiC654 DrMOS chips are used as on the GPU VRM.


The GDDR6X memory chips are made by Micron and carry the model number D8BWW, which decodes to MT61K256M32JE-19G:T. They are specified to run at 1188 MHz (19 Gbps GDDR6X effective).


NVIDIA's GA102 graphics processor is the company's second Ampere architecture chip; the first one targeted at GeForce gamers. It is produced on a 8 nanometer process at Samsung and has a transistor count of 28 billion with a die size of 628 mm².