Asus and Noctua will soon paint the town shades of beige thanks to a new collaboration. The duo have once again provided us with an RTX 4080 Super Noctua Edition graphics card. It’s as big as a brick, taking up four slots, and the two full-sized, high-performance, 120mm NFG-A12x25 fans are finished with a colour to match. We joke, of course, even if the signature brown we’ve come to love would fit right in a wall.
This model is basically a refresh of the team’s previous collab, the RTX 4080 Noctua Edition. The only difference here is that the AD103 die inside is now maxed out. This marks the fourth Asus/Noctua collaboration featuring its beautifully beige cooler. It all started with the original RTX 3070 version and the 4.1-slot RTX 3080 that succeeded it.
Nevertheless, we can’t help but feel there was a missed opportunity here. It’s a shame Noctua and Asus haven’t taken the time to produce a chromax.black version as an alternative to the blacked-out Founders Edition. As it stands, this appears to be the very same cooler they’ve been peddling for years.
Same, same, but different
The design features a black shroud with grey accents, contrasted by two 120mm Noctua fans in stock brown and beige. The backplate is painted matte black, featuring contrasting white stripes and GeForce RTX branding on both ends of the card. We also see a dual BIOS switch in the bottom centre for a choice between performance or silent operation modes. Finally, there are two cutouts for several MOSFETs, and a cutout to the rear that provides an additional path for airflow.
The Asus GeForce RTX 4080 Super Noctua Edition cooler specs should also remain exactly the same. This means it’s a gargantuan 4.3-slot card that measures a whopping 310 x 144.8 x 87.5mm in size. This is owed mostly to those 120mm Noctua fans inside. The custom-designed heatsink is also partially to blame, using a vast copper base which encompasses both the GPU and VRAM in one fell swoop.
Lastly, the card comes with a healthy factory overclock compared to Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards. It is said to feature a 2,610MHz default overclock and a potential 2,640MHz overclock in performance mode. Pricing has yet to be announced, and the relative performance bump over the existing RTX 4080 is unknown. It can’t be a million miles away from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super Founders Edition, though.
