Do you have $1,650 US Dollars to spend on a GPU? Neither do I. However, for those that want to pay RTX 4090 prices for an RTX 4080 you can now buy the 4-Slot Asus RTX 4080 Noctua OC.
I’m not going to list this as a news post because there is absolutely no way I can keep opinion out of this overpriced owl face.
Look, I like Noctua. I really do. The L9 series coolers have been my go-to for SFF cooling. Their fans are top notch. Even the huge NH-D15 is worth the money at $109 it typically retails for. It’s not a value king, but one could justify it. I also like Asus. I use their boards all the time thanks to the relative ease of their BIOS and their ITX builds. But let’s be clear here; there is not $450 of value added to any GPU by adding a larger heatsink and two Noctua fans that retail at $33 each. There is just no way to justify this price.
Worse, for your $450 investment you are greeted with something far worse than fan noise; coil whine. Guru3D found that the card exhibited audible coil whine in open chassis designs. It was mitigated somewhat by a closed case, but how many of our SFF designs don’t have mesh or ventilation holes all over the sides of them? Frankly, with all the holes in SFF designs they’re more like cages than cases. I’ll take fan noise over coil whine any day of the week.
Even worse still, TechPowerUp found that the MSI RTX 4080 Gaming and PNY RTX 4080 OC were actually quieter than the Asus/Noctua combo when the Noctua unit was set for performance mode. What exactly are we getting for the money other than a GPU that looks like it wants to count the licks to get to the center of a Tootisie Pop.
Reading over the reviews I can see that reviewers are straining to avoid the $1,650 elephant in the room. Almost all the “thumbs up” in certain reviews are items shared across all RTX 4080s and not exclusive to the Noctua. I feel for these reviewers who have to strike a careful balance between criticism and not getting shunned by companies for review items they need to produce their content. However, no matter how you try to write it, there is no escaping that there is no justifying a $450 up-charge for this unit. Noctua and Asus are only hurting their reputation with this pricing, and there really isn’t a GPU shortage anymore to force consumers to just eat the up-charge.
That’s just my opinion though. Post yours in our forums.
Here are the reviews on it:
