Introduction

ASUS GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua OC is the third generation of enthusiast-segment graphics cards from the collaboration between ASUS and Noctua. We were blown away by the RTX 3080 Noctua OC, and the two companies only levelled things up with the RTX 4080 Noctua OC, which tremendously raised our expectations for the card we're reviewing today. Noctua is a pioneering brand with ultra-quiet fans that implement hydro-dynamic bearings, and the company constantly innovates new motor, impeller and bearing designs with its main line of case fans that are sold both as standalone units, and included with its class-leading range of CPU coolers. ASUS, on the other hand, is the market leader in custom PCB design for graphics cards, and has a formidable lineup of custom design graphics cards on its own, under its ROG Astral, ROG Strix, and TUF Gaming brands. Thus, the ASUS x Noctua collaboration can only be seen from the lens of an enthusiast-segment product that prioritizes low noise above everything else, without compromising on out-of-the-box performance or overclocking headroom.



The ASUS GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua OC is built upon the foundation of the ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC PCB, with a complete replacement of its cooling solution. Noctua leads the design effort of this cooler, which consists of two sets of aluminium fin-stack heatsinks with an asymmetric arrangement of fins that improves heat dissipation. The heatsink makes contact with the GPU over a vapor chamber plate, and a premium phase-change thermal pad. The real star of the show is the trio of Noctua NF-A12x25 G2 120 mm fans. These are proper retail grade fans that have been integrated into the cooling solution.

Compared to the past two generations, ASUS and Noctua have taken greater care to ensure that the cooler shroud design makes the card appear like a cohesive factory-made product, and not a card with a DIY cooling solution installed by the user. The G2 fan features Noctua's second generation progressive-bend impeller with flow-acceleration channels, winglets, and a unique hub design Noctua calls centralized turbulator. The impeller is made of Sterrox liquid-crystal polymer. The fan also comes with Noctua's SSO2 hydro-dynamic bearing. The cooler has been extensively tested by Noctua to ensure the lowest possible noise levels from an air-cooled RTX 5080, lower than even a DIY liquid cooling setup that includes pump noise.

The GeForce RTX 5080 is an enthusiast-segment graphics card from NVIDIA that's second only to the flagship RTX 5090. It is designed for maxed out gameplay at 4K Ultra HD resolution, including ray tracing. It is powered by the latest Blackwell graphics architecture, which introduces new technologies such as Neural Rendering—the ability to combine photorealistic objects created by generative AI models into raster graphics—ray tracing with Mega Geometry, and the new DLSS 4 feature-set, which introduces Transformer-based AI models that are more accurate and significantly improve image quality at every performance preset. NVIDIA also introduced the Blackwell-exclusive Multi Frame Generation feature, which lets the GPU draw up to three frames following every conventionally rendered one, to effectively quadruple frame-rates.

The GeForce RTX 5080 is based on the GB203 silicon, which it maxes out, enabling all 84 SM physically present on the chip, to enjoy 10,752 CUDA cores, 336 Tensor cores, 84 RT cores, 336 TMUs, and 112 ROPs. You get 16 GB of 30 Gbps GDDR7 memory across the chip's full 256-bit wide memory bus, for 960 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Besides GDDR7, the other new standards Blackwell implements are a PCI-Express 5.0 host interface, and ATX 3.1 with PCIe 5.1 CEM power architecture. The power input is the more durable 12V-2x6, an evolution of the 12VHPWR connector.

ASUS has given the RTX 5080 Noctua OC factory overclocked speeds of 2700 MHz boost compared to 2617 MHz, which is halfway between those of the ROG Astral RTX 5080, and the ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC Edition. The company is pricing the card at around $1500, which is a steep premium, but what's on offer are noise levels that beat even liquid cooling solutions.

Packaging

The Card

ASUS has definitely refined the design theme of the RTX 5080 Noctua when compared to previous generations. You now also get a third fan and everything seems much more integrated. As expected, the color theme yells "Noctua," which of course is fine, given the branding and target audience. On the back, you'll find a metal backplate with a cutout to let airflow through.


Dimensions of the card are 39.0 x 15.5 cm, and it weighs 2667 g.


Installation requires four slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 82 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1b and two HDMI 2.1b.

All GeForce RTX 50-series Blackwell cards feature a new display engine supporting DisplayPort 2.1b with UHBR20, as well as HDMI 2.1a. Both interfaces support DSC (display stream compression). With DSC enabled, a single DisplayPort on this card can drive 4K 12-bit HDR at 480 Hz; or 8K 12-bit HDR at up to 165 Hz. The RTX 5080 features an updated media acceleration engine with support for 4:2:2 video formats, AV1 UHQ, and MV-HEVC. There are two independent NVENC and NVDEC units.


The card uses a single 16-pin connector, which allows a maximum power draw of 600 W, but the board power limit is set much lower of course, at 360 W, with a manual adjustment range allowing up to 450 W.


There is no lighting on the ASUS RTX 5080 Noctua.

Teardown

The main cooler shroud with the three Noctua fans can be removed as one piece. This makes cleaning or replacing the fans very easy, without disturbing the thermal paste.


Three big 120 mm fans provide plenty of airflow for the heatsink below.


The fans are Noctua's NF-A12x25 G2 PWM PPA fans.


ASUS's thermal solution uses eleven heatpipes and a vapor-chamber. It provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The metal backplate protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

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-resolution versions are also available (front, back).

Circuit Board (PCB) Analysis

A 16-phase VRM powers the GPU, highlighted in the red rectangles above. These are controlled by a Monolithic Power Systems MP29816 controller.


All GPU power phases use Vishay SiC658A DrMOS, rated for 50 A.


Powering the GDDR7 memory chips is a 3-phase VRM driven by a uPI uP9529Q controller.


Just like GPU, the memory is handled by Vishay SiC658A DrMOS, rated for 50 A.


The GDDR7 memory chips are made by Samsung, and bear the model number K4VAF325ZC-SC32, they are rated for 32 Gbps.


The NVIDIA GB203 GPU at the heart of the GeForce RTX 5080 is much smaller than the chip used on the RTX 5090. It is fabricated using a 5 nanometer "NVIDIA 4N" process at TSMC Taiwan (same process as Ada). The die measures 378 mm², and comes with a transistor count of 45.6 billion.

Test System

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

• All games and cards are tested with the drivers listed above—no performance results were recycled between test systems. Only this exact system with exactly the same configuration is used for all results in this review.
• All graphics cards are tested using the same game version.
• All games are set to their highest quality setting unless indicated otherwise.
• All games are running at their native resolution without upscaling (no DLSS or FSR), except for the results on the "DLSS 4" page where we specifically look into that feature's performance
• All games have ray tracing disabled, except for testing on the "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing" pages
• AA and AF are applied via in-game settings, not via the driver's control panel.
• Before starting measurements, we heat up the card for each test to ensure a steady state is tested. This ensures that the card won't boost to unrealistically high clocks for only a few seconds until it heats up, as that doesn't represent prolonged gameplay.
• For better real-life applicability, all game tests use custom in-game test scenes, not the integrated benchmarks
• All cards used for comparison are reference designs. When a reference design does not exist, we go the extra mile and buy the closest possible match, which has reference clocks and default power limit.

Each game is tested at these screen resolutions:

• 1920x1080: Most popular monitor resolution.
• 2560x1440: Intermediary resolution between Full HD and 4K, with reasonable performance requirements.
• 3840x2160: 4K Ultra HD resolution, available on high-end monitors.