Asus GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua OC Edition review

The Asus GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is claimed to be the "quietest graphics card in its class" and I don't doubt it's in the running. Though upon first removing it from its box, I was sure it had earned itself at least one accolade: it's easily the largest graphics card I've ever tested. Just a year or two ago, I would have laughed at sheer heft of the RTX 4080 Founders Edition—it looks practically pint-sized next to the Noctua Edition.

This colossus is the product of a partnership between Asus and Noctua. The cooling company is providing three of its NF-A12x25 120 mm fans for the shroud here, including a splash of brown that we don't see on a GPU too often. I think it looks great, with an almost steampunk appearance on account of its massive heft and unusual colourway. It even sparkles a little in the light, which is a nice touch.

Though its powerful look is a limit on what you can pair with it. It's very easy to clash given it's sporting Noctua's telltale brown, unless you pair it with more Noctua brown.

So that's what I did. I paired the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition with the only kit I could think to: the Noctua NH-D15 G2 cooler and a couple NF-A14x25 G2 fans. All loaded into the Havn BF 360. A gorgeous combination, if I dare say myself.

But it's also extremely easy to build an ugly PC with this card. I moved it over to our MSI/Cyberpower test system for benchmarking, which is all-white and bathed in RGB lights, and the RTX 5080 looks absolutely horrid. I had to avert my eyes for the remainder of the tests.

Weighing in at 2.607 kg—enough that I weighed it on my human scales, not my kitchen scales—this card features a huge heatsink riddled with heat pipes. Four of these heat pipes run the length of the card, which, at 385 mm, is only able to fit inside very spacious cases. The rest culminate near the vapour chamber that sits atop the GPU.

One of the less spoken about but important parts of a graphics card's construction is the thermal interface material (TIM). This card offers a phase-change thermal pad to keep an even contact between the heatsink and GPU at all times, and ideally, over a long period of time. The card has a lapped contact plate atop of the GB203 GPU, a technique that Asus calls MaxContact. It reckons this alone knocks up to 2 °C off.

For I/O, this card includes two HDMI 2.1 ports (one above the other) alongside three DisplayPort 2.1 ports, which run the remaining length of the two-slot bracket. It's absolutely a four-slot card, however, measuring 388 x 80 x 138 mm by my own measurements

The graphics card offers two BIOS modes: Performance and Quiet. These are switched via a tiny switch near the 16-pin connector. The Quiet mode keeps the clock speed at 2,700 MHz. The Performance mode sets it to 2,730 MHz.

PC Gamer test platform
Supplied by Cyberpower | MSI

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D | Motherboard: MSI MPG X870E Edge Ti WiFi | RAM: Kingston Fury Beast RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) @ 6,000 MT/s | Cooler: MAG CoreLiquid i360 White | SSD: Spatium M480 Pro 2 TB | PSU: MPG A1000GS PCIe 5 | Case: MAG Pano 100R White

Switching between the Quiet and Performance modes doesn't result in any major changes for performance or noise levels. A frame or two in Cyberpunk 2077 at most. That checks out, not only because of the small increase in clock speed between the two, but how much further the RTX 5080 can be pushed with an actual overclock. You can slap a couple hundred MHz more without even thinking about it—let alone with a beefy card such as this.

In fact, I slapped on a 400 MHz core offset and a 1,000 MHz memory offset onto the Noctua without thinking about it. I added an extra 10% power, too—the Noctua Edition offers up to 25%. In Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, that earned me eight more frames on average right there. I barely lifted a finger.

The three G2 fans shut down when the card is under 50 °C. They start back up again at 55 °C. Even when this happens, they generate very little noise—not all that noticeable when I'm sat at my desk playing a game. A large fan can shift more air at slower speeds compared to smaller fan, and the Noctua Edition has very large fans compared to most. With low RPM and low noise, my test bench is actually too loud to pick up a specific reading for the Noctua card on my noise meter; the card operates quietly enough as to fade into the background hum of the PC.

As for temperatures, it's nothing short of exceptional that the GB203 GPU was never seen above 61 °C during an extended run of Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition. That's 11 °C lower than the MSI RTX 5080 Ventus 3X OC White, which is nothing short of spectacular, and moreover is not particularly impactful on performance—the two cards performed more or less the same in many tests.

Though what is impressive is that, even when overclocked and drawing more power and running at a significantly higher clock speed, the Noctua Edition kept its cool. Temperature difference in my testing was negligible, which suggests thermals are not going to be any sort of restriction on most realistic overclocking aspirations.

Those sorts of thermal bragging rights are what you're paying the big bucks for here. And you will be expected to pay the big bucks.

The RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is available to purchase for $1,700/£1,560. That's on the expensive side for an RTX 5080 today, though not by as much as you'd expect. The sorry state of the high-end GPU market means that this is not totally out of the ordinary—the RTX 5080 Founders Edition is $1,629—and the Noctua Edition is around $335 more than the cheapest RTX 5080 I've seen.

I have doubts about whether it's worth buying any version of an RTX 5080 right now, let alone a high-end model over $300 more than most. That's not to say the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition isn't something impressive. It absolutely is. I've been waiting to test it myself since I first laid eyes on it at Computex in May, 2025, and it looks even better in a build befitting its majesty. The GB203 GPU is crying out for an overclock, and the headroom offered by this cooling solution is superb.

To review the card itself, and not the market, it's a great pick. Unfortunately, we can't just take value for money out of the equation, and on that front, I'd still rather an RTX 5070 Ti for not quite half price, but not far off either.