- Now, wait a minute.
This may very well be the quietest air cooled GPU in its
class,
but enthusiastic have been bolting full-sized case fans to
their GPU's for over a decade.
Could it possibly be worth buying one of these,
the ASUS X NOCTUA RTX 3070,
when you could just redneck engineer your own?
Guess we'll find out won't we?
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I mean, it's kind of cheating, isn't it?
ASUS NOCTUA performance claims may very well pan out
in the end, but the thing is comically large.
Look at this.
- [Andy] Oh my God.
- I mean,
it's not like we haven't seen cards with taller PCBs before.
It's not like we haven't seen cards with long coolers on
them before,
but what I don't know if I've seen before is this appears to
be, a quadruple slot card and not only that,
but the thing about quadruple slot cards is you're going to
need at least one next to it for these fans to get any kind
of air intake. I mean,
the truly mind blowing to me is not only did they put full
sized 120 millimeter by 25 millimeter thick
NFA12 desktop fans on the thing,
but they actually made the shroud like taller than them.
You know,
it's the kind of thing that I have to look at and go that
probably wasn't ASUS's idea.
That was probably NOCTUA's idea or something to have this
part sticking out here to make sure that under no
circumstances would a NOCTUA cooled graphics card,
not perform properly because you can see that right there
gives these fans quite a lot of buffer to take in air,
because you can't have anything right next to it.
You know, I actually kind of liked the look.
Well, yeah. I just,
I think that's going to be a bit of a controversial take.
It's kind of sexy in like an ugly way, you know,
does that make sense?
Then it's like that,
like having a really like scary stuffed animal, you know,
it's like scary, cute.
It's ugly sexy.
Yeah, man, this is such an obvious collab,
I can't believe it took this long good on ASUS for
getting it together. I had sort of expected it,
(unintelligible) more than just strap their fans to a
graphics card.
Now they claim they did,
but their Bauer did a video about this card already.
And as far as he could tell,
the claims that ASUS and NOCTUA,
you know, painstakingly redesigned,
this heat sync component,
don't appear to hold any water.
It seems to be exactly the same heat sink for me,
ASUS RTX 3070 TUF Gaming.
Let's play count the slots, shall we?
So you've got your 1, 2, 3,
wait hold on.
1, 2, 3, 4,
4 slots,
but can I actually install a card right next to it
in that 5th one?
Holy Schnike's,
it's actually going to push it a little bit and it's
not even, this isn't even a long enough car to
interfere with the peak of the bulge.
It's like, it's like 4.1 slots,
I guess it kind of makes sense. I mean,
you look at high-end motherboards these days and lots of
them don't have a full compliment of PCI express slots
like they used to.
They'll have just one 60 next slot up at the top.
And then maybe a couple of more because so many of the
platforms PCIE lanes are taken up by storage now.
So if you're not going to be installing anything in it
anyway, I guess you might as well have a thick,
chunky ass GPU like this one,
of course you might not as well have it unless there's
actually a performance benefit.
Let's get it on the bench.
Although, first, this is here for reference so we can
see what, I'm going to call this a regular RTX 3070,
with a triple fan cooler on here is going to get us in
terms of acoustic results.
To be clear,
this is a thick card and around 44 decibels while turboing
to 1950 megahertz and do maternal with GPU temp sitting at
63 degrees on the dye and 73 degrees on the hotspot.
Very respectable.
The NOCTUA, one's just going to have to do better,
If it's going to take up a fourth slot.
As we shut down the system here,
we'll get a good opportunity to show you guys are noise
floor here in the workshop with the HVAC off.
So I'm going to shut up for a second here.
At 28, 29 decibels.
It's not an anechoic chamber in here by any stretch of the
imagination,
but it's good enough for us to pick up a more normal
RTX 3070.
So it should be good enough for us to tell if this is
better.
This thing looks so ridiculous.
I know, right?
Like the hilarious thing is the CPU cooler bag here is what
used to pass for, you know, a big CPU cooler.
Now it looks like a toy getting CPU cooler envy over here.
Ah,
something to note is that just like the tough gaming card
that this is based on,
there's a performance and quiet mode switch on the back of a
card here, ships in quiet mode.
But my assumption is that even performance mode on this
thing would probably end up being pretty quiet.
I mean,
this is not my first kick at the NOCTUA can here.
I know that they make really quiet fans, but,
damn, it's a little awkward.
We went to get a reading off of it just to show that it's
under the noise floor in the room and the fans went and
turned off cause it has a zero RPM mode.
So let's go ahead and fire up a light game.
Theoretically,
this is one of those cards that has such a large heat sink
on it that you should be able to run lighter titles without
the fans even turning on.
But we'll see if that actually holds up,
and immediately, there are a couple of
observations we can make.
One is that the fans did in fact spin up.
So Sianora zero RPM gaming.
And number 2 is that Roman deBauer observed
that there was some coil wind on his card.
And I can verify that I'm getting some as well.
Yeah, I mean,
it's not loud in a way the product is kind of a victim of
its own success because I wouldn't be able to hear that over
the noise of a regular cooler.
It's just that I wish part of the collaboration between
NOCTUA and ASUS had been to design a board that managed
extremely quiet power delivery.
I need a piece of metal like a side panel.
Ah,
my lovely assistant James is over here helping prepare our
victim for the thing you saw in the intro,
time for an extremely scientific experiment.
I'm going to get within earshot of the coil wind and put
this panel in between us.
Confirmed then,
as long as you've got it in a case like a normal
person, the coil wind not likely to be a problem.
Let's all just put the ball down. Huh?
Huh?
They done did it. They took my stuff.
Get outta here. Boomer.
Let's have a look at this equilibrium yet.
Wow.
Has it ever,
55 degrees with
66 on the hotspot,
and that's clocked at 1950.
Just like we saw before,
my fans are off, my fans are freaking off.
Of course, Rocket League.
Not as demanding as do maternal.
Let's fire that up next and we didn't even check the
acoustics. Okay.
Turn back on. Come on.
- That's okay.
- Oh excellent.
- I don't exactly know what you want.
I cut all the screws.
- Yes.
Okay. Bye.
You're not done.
- You got the fan.
- Yeah.
Cause I'm going to put my own fans on it.
Yeah.
That's the thing that happens when you pull off the female
receptacle and you're trying to remove the male connector.
Well, it's fine.
Cause it's going to go back onto there anyway. Whoops.
- I think dogs get stuck together.
- Wow. What a weird thing to say.
Here you go.
Wow.
That sounds like it's spinning really fast,
but this is like an 11 blade fan or something like that.
So it hits your finger a lot more frequently per revolution.
Does that make sense?
I don't think it's going to heat up any more than it did.
That is outstanding.
No crazy frequency on this GPU or at hitting 1860,
but that's to be expected. This is not the OC version.
And then in terms of temps,
we managed to get up to 57 and 68 on the hotspot.
And the craziest part is I don't think these fans even spun
up anymore at all here, Every body Shh.
Yeah. We're right back to the noise floor.
You should note though,
you're not going to see those kinds of temperatures in the
real world because we're in a pretty cool room about 18 and
a half degrees. And we're running on an open bench,
which means that the GPU isn't sucking up hot air that was
preheated by the CPU or any other components.
However, that's a pretty compelling use case for a
card like this.
If you have a, a stuffier case,
maybe a silence optimized one,
having a card that can run 10 degrees colder than the
competition means that your case temps could be 10 degrees
higher.
And the thing still wouldn't thermal throttle,
not to mention the fans hadn't even ramped up yet.
Honestly,
this looks fine to me because you've got all the screws for
this like heat spreader plate.
And you've got the four main screws for the actual fins
leaving only one question.
Is there truly anything special about this
ASUS NOCTUA collab, or could I achieve the same
results with a couple of off the shelf NOCTUA fans and
a roll of duct tape?
You ready Andy?
- [Andy] Go for it.
- All right, I'm I'm going to position my fan.
I'm doing some careful simulation engineering here.
I'm going to position my fan right at the edge
of this heat sink because I want to take advantage of as
much of this pass through cooling as I can.
So I'm gonna put that, put that right there.
I'm going to make myself a little kind of shroud. Okay.
Okay. So that's going to go right there so we don't.
Oh wait. No, no, I can't do that.
No,
I'm not going to make myself any kind of shroud the only,
Hmm. Yeah.
What is the best way to take advantage of this?
Because this is where the air has got to come out. Wait.
No, no, no, yeah, no, no, no.
Not on this side. Yeah.I was right in the first place,
only on this side where there's pass through. So stupid,
stupid like a Fox.
I'm sure.
Look. All right.
Let's see you engineer a, a cooler in 10 minutes.
What are the kids say?
Pogchamp is this pogchamp GPU edition.
I mean, in fairness,
mine really doesn't look that much uglier and,
and my design is quite bit more compact. Okay.
I think it's only three slots and change.
It's a full slot. Less.
Thanks Andy.
I was waiting for somebody to say it they're definitely
spinning faster,
but I think part of the problem is that those are tied to
CPU fan speeds.
I have an idea.
I could go into the bios and reconfigure the fan curves,
but I got (unintelligible) in just a few minutes here.
So I'll just throw a couple of little noise adapters on
them.
Let's go ahead and get an acoustic reading now,
it's not going to change because the fan speed is not
tied to GPU temperatures in any way,
which could be dangerous unless our cooler,
it was way overkill, which I suspect this probably is.
So here I'll shut up. Let's uh.
Just like the official NOCTUA GPU,
We are below the noise floor of this room,
which is around 29 decibels. Really freaking quiet.
What about performance?
Let's check out our Canadian engineering here.
Oh, it's not as good. Not even close.
We suck.
Oh no. Okay.
We're still turboing to 1875, 1890 megahertz,
but we've got a problem.
We hit GPU temps of 83 degrees,
and a hotspot temp of 96.
So to answer the question,
can you just build one for yourself?
The answer is no,
not unless you're willing to compromise on the silence that
NOCTUA and ASUS have achieved with this collaborative
product, because we have demonstrated in the past that you
absolutely can just clip 120 millimeter fan to your GPU
cooler and it will perform pretty darn well, you just,
aren't going to get away with using low noise adapters if
you want to have proper performance.
So dang, good product ASUS NOCTUA,
good job guys.
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