Asus has teamed up with cooling brand Noctua to release yet another fan favourite (the pun, the pun) Noctua Edition graphics card. This time it’s Nvidia’s Blackwell turn, starring an RTX 5080 GPU. This special graphics card houses three NF-A12x25 G2 PWM 120mm fans on top of a large vapour-chamber heatsink, resulting in a massive quad-slot design.
As usual with these special collaborations, the RTX 5080 Noctua OC Edition won’t come cheap. Yours for a cool £1,499. For reference, that’s a £550 premium over Nvidia’s official MSRP for RTX 5080. For this extra cost, you get a cooler built for low noise and performance at the same time. While we have yet to get one for review, we already expect it to offer better acoustics compared to basic models.
A good example of the quality of Noctua fans can be seen in our liquid cooler mod, where we swapped the original fans with three NF-A12x25 G2. The results are lower temperatures and quieter operation at all speeds. So here we are waiting for Noctua to finally release its AIO liquid cooler next year, so we could get a liquid cooler version of these GPUs.
Asus claims that this design lowers the GPU temperature by 6°C and the VRAM temperature by about 2°C compared to the ROG Astral, while lowering noise from 35.9dBA to 21.4dBA. Its cooling capabilities become more impressive when locking all cards at 500rpm fan speed, where the Noctua Edition maintains a 13°C advantage on the GPU and 12°C on the VRAM temperatures.
As you can guess, placing 120mm fans on top of a graphics card takes space, making the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition among the largest cards you can buy, beating even the monster ROG Astral in terms the spatial stakes. In case you plan on getting one, make sure that you have room for this 385mm (L) x 151mm (W) quad-slot slab. Preferably with a GPU support mechanism to help secure this beast’s 2.6kg weight.
At £1,499, the Asus RTX 5080 Noctua Edition is the most expensive model in Scan’s available stock, surpassing the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5080 White and the liquid-cooled Gigabyte Aorus RTX 5080 Xtreme WaterForce. Whether the extra £500+ over standard models is worth it will depend on your finances and needs.
