THERE’S A CERTAIN TYPE of individual who
will absolutely love Asus’s enormous
RTX 3070 Noctua edition graphics card.
It’s large enough that the gravitational
pull might actually throw off scientific
instruments in the vicinity. But seriously,
it’s big, brown, and beautiful! Anyone
who has ever wanted to build a Noctua-
themed PC need look no further. So what
if you don’t love Noctua? Or if you actually
like RGB bling, or if you’re just after the
fastest possible graphics card? Well,
Asus covers those bases as well, just not
with this Noctua card.
Fundamentally, this is a unicorn sort of
graphics card: It’s mythical in proportions
and, even after seeing it, hard to believe
it actually exists. If someone were to
suggest slapping two large 120mm
Noctua fans on a graphics card to provide
improved cooling and lower noise levels,
it would certainly make sense.
Given the cost of creating a new
custom cooler and shroud, however, I’d
be inclined to go with the absolute fastest
possible GPU available, or at least pretty
close to it. That would be the RTX 3090 or
RTX 3080 Ti. The RTX 3070, meanwhile,
sits in fifth place in terms of Nvidia
GPUs—and soon to be sixth place with
the imminent arrival of the RTX 3090 Ti.
What’s more, Asus doesn’t even equip
the 3070 Noctua with the best-binnedSupersize your graphics card!
Asus RTX 3070 Noctua
7
VERDICT Asus RTX 3070 NoctuaGINORMOUS Impressive size;
quiet fans; no RGB.
BLOATED ‘Only’ a 3070; needs four slots;
overpriced.
$999, http://www.asus.com/SPECIFICATIONSArchitecture GA104
Lithography Samsung 8N
Boost Clock 1845MHz
GPU Cores 5888
Memory 8GB GDDR6
TFLOPS FP32 21.7
Bandwidth 448GBps
TDP 225W
Connectors 2x HDMI 2.1, 3x DisplayPort 1.43070 GPUs. Those go into the ROG
Strix 3070 models with boost clocks of
1935MHz. The Noctua card by comparison
has a boost clock of 1845MHz. Sure, that’s
125MHz higher than Nvidia’s RTX 3070
reference clocks, but it’s 90MHz lower
than the Strix and the same speed as the
more mundane Asus TUF series. Due to
its uniqueness, street prices for the 3070
Noctua card tend to be $50 to $100 higher
than the Strix, which already costs $50 to
$100 more than other 3070 models.
Putting all of that aside for a moment,
the 3070 Noctua is still a great card and
offers an unusual aesthetic. It’s also
quiet—we measured just 38dB of noise
at 10cm during gaming tests, which was
5–10dB lower than most competing RTX
3070 cards. Temperatures were also
excellent, with the GPU core sitting at
60°C after an extended test sequence.
Then again, the RTX 3070 isn’t a
particularly hot GPU to begin with, as
even the Founders Edition only hit 66°C
in testing. But the Noctua card did deliver
six percent higher performance on
average than the Founders Edition while
also running cooler and quieter.
Asus probably chose the RTX 3070 for
the Noctua treatment thanks to better
availability. Data from Steam indicates
that the RTX 3070 is the most popular
Ampere card right now, with nearly twiceas many 3070 cards as 3080 cards, and
over four times as many as the 3090.
Unfortunately, finding any of the RTX
30-series cards in stock at a reasonable
price continues to be nearly impossible.
The average 3070 on eBay sold for $1,180
last month—that’s more than double the
official MSRP—and the Asus 3070 Noctua
currently shows up at nearly $1,300. At
that price, you might be better off trying
to grab an RTX 3070 Ti.
Still, I can’t help but love this card. It’s
comically huge, and I can just imagine
putting it into a custom-painted brown
and tan case, equipped with a handful of
Noctua fans, augmented with some softly
glowing brown LEDs, and paired up with
a keyboard sporting the MiTo MT3 Noctua
keycaps. That would be amazing—totally
pointless, but amazing!
Hopefully, this isn’t the last we see of
Asus teaming up with Noctua. Give us a
Noctua-themed motherboard, and when
Lovelace and the RTX 40-series launch
later this year, do the cooler and fans
justice and pair them up with a Strix-
binned RTX 4080 GPU. Because if there’s
one thing a Noctua fan desires, it’s more
Noctua. –JARRED WALTONBENCHMARKSAsus RTX 3070 Noctua RTX 3070 RX 6800
8 Game Avg (GeoMean) 97 / 74 92 / 70 95 / 73
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 111 / 89 105 / 85 120 / 93
Borderlands 3 122 / 90 116 / 85 156 / 112
Control (DXR) 71 / 46 69 / 45 53 / 34
Cyberpunk 2077 (DXR) 51 / 31 48 / 29 30 / 20
Dirt 5 125 / 103 117 / 97 140 / 114
Horizon Zero Dawn 122 / 108 116 / 102 142 / 119
Metro Exodus 102 / 82 99 / 79 102 / 85
Red Dead Redemption 2 102 / 84 97 / 80 114 / 96Best scores are in bold. All testing conducted with a Core i9-9900K, MSI MEG Z390 ACE, 2x 16GB DDR4-3600
CL16, 2TB XPG 8200 Pro M.2 SSD, Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W. Scores are average frame rates at
1920x1080/2560x1440, with ray tracing enabled in Control and Cyberpunk.in the lab
74 MAXIMU MPC MAR 2022