If you love gaming with all the settings maxed out, but hate your PC sounding like it has a jet engine inside it, then this new super quiet Asus graphics card based on the latest Nvidia GPU has your wallet in its sights. Built in collaboration with cooling specialist Noctua, and based on the latest Nvidia high-end GPU, the new Asus GeForce RTX 4080 Super 16GB GDDR6X Noctua OC Edition is described by its maker as “the quietest air-cooled graphics card in its class.”
We were impressed by the latest GPU from Nvidia in our RTX 4080 Super review, where we gave our Asus TUF graphics card sample a score of 9/10 – it’s undoubtedly now the best graphics card in its league. Unlike its predecessor, the new Super GPU isn’t absurdly overpriced, and it has a decent specs list as well.
What’s more, this new Asus Noctua card overclocks the new GPU by up to 90MHz, making it even faster, while noise is kept to an absolute bare minimum by the large Noctua cooling system. It might look like an owl that got stuck in your granny’s hosiery, but at least it does it quietly.
The main perk of the cooler is the pair of Noctua NF-A12x25 fans, which are primarily designed to be used in PC cases and water-cooling radiators. These fans have been widely acclaimed by PC hardware enthusiasts for years, and I can attest to their amazing performance and low-noise operation in my own benchmarking. In terms of airflow-to-noise ratio, these are the best fans I’ve used, though they’re not cheap at $35 a pop.
Of course, full-size case fans aren’t small either, and this Asus card will occupy the space of more than four expansion slots in your case. Accordingly, you also get a support bracket in the box, as well as a screwdriver to help you fit it. Asus has designed the rest of the cooler to keep the noise down as well. “From the shroud down to the heatspreader, every aspect is optimized to minimize noise,” the company says.
You don’t sacrifice performance to get this quieter operation either. Even in its default quiet mode, this Asus Noctua card has a 2,610MHz boost clock, which is 60MHz above the stock 2,550MHz frequency for this GPU. However, you can also flip the BIOS switch to switch it into its 26,40MHz OC mode for extra performance.
Asus also touts the card’s “0dB technology”, which the company says “lets you enjoy light gaming in relative silence.” I’ve always been of the opinion that something is either silent or not, rather than relative, but it looks as though this card will only run the fans at low speeds during lighter loads.
This isn’t the first time Asus and Noctua have collaborated on a graphics card together, with the first cards appearing in the Ampere RTX 3000-series era, and it’s great to see that low-noise graphics cards are still a priority for Asus.
Not everyone can afford the latest top-end GPU, though. If the RTX 4080 Super is too expensive for your budget, check our new RTX 4070 Super review, as well as our Radeon RX 7600 XT review, at the cheaper end of the scale.