ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 3070 8GB GDDR6 Graphics Card

ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua OC is a pleasant surprise this season, which is dominated by news from AMD and Intel. Personally, I’ve always wondered why Noctua doesn’t get involved in more collaborations—with an extremely strong reputation and brand name, they are THE cooling specialists. I feel like ASUS is a great match for Noctua, as they have tons of experience with graphics card engineering and can offer the resources to support such a project.

NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 3070 almost exactly a year ago, on October 27th 2020. In my launch-day review, I was impressed by the performance, which beat last generation’s RTX 2080 Ti flagship. This still hasn’t changed. Even today, the RTX 3070 is an excellent card with tons of horsepower to breeze through all the latest titles at 1440p. You’re also able to play most games at 4K if you’re willing to reduce details a little bit. ASUS has given their Noctua card a factory OC, up to a rated boost of 1815 MHz from NVIDIA’s default of 1725 MHz. This is a 5.2% increase; in reality, the real-life performance gained is around 1%—surprising, but not unexpected. Other RTX 3070 designs we’ve reviewed, of which there are seven in total, don’t do much better here. For daily gaming, it’ll be impossible to subjectively notice the performance difference, we’re talking 100 vs. 101 FPS here. Compared to the Radeon RX 6700 XT, the ASUS RTX 3070 is 8% faster, and the RTX 3060 Ti is 12% behind. NVIDIA launched the RTX 3070 Ti a while ago; it’s only 4% faster than the ASUS card, and AMD’s RX 6800 is 10% ahead.

The highlight of the RTX 3070 Noctua is definitely the massive cooling solution. ASUS has taken their RTX 3070 TUF as base, kept the PCB design, and engineered a completely new heatsink and fan shroud. The fans used are standard Noctua NF-A12x25 120 mm fans (our review is here). I really like this approach, and maybe it’s the future of graphics card cooling. If we had standard fans on graphics cards like we do on CPU coolers, enthusiasts would be able to mix and match the fans to optimize their cooling setup. Standard fans would also make it trivial to replace a broken graphics card fan, which is the number one reason why old graphics cards are dying. On the other hand, visually, the Noctua RTX 3070 doesn’t look as refined as cards like the NVIDIA Founders Editions with their highly polished, industrial design. I’m sure there will be a lot of talk about the color choices and appearance of the RTX 3070 Noctua—both are secondary to me, what matters are noise levels and cooling performance.

Noise levels of the RTX 3070 Noctua are so impressive I had to double check that the fans were really spinning because I couldn’t hear the graphics card at all even while running heavy gaming workloads at 4K. With 23.1 dBA, the card is truly whisper-quiet, and has set a new record. I’ve reviewed over 700 graphics cards in the last 15 years, and none was as quiet as the RTX 3070 Noctua. You could argue that the few passively cooled cards on the market are quieter, but these play in a completely different league performance-wise. While low noise levels usually mean high temperatures, this is not the case with the RTX 3070 Noctua. Thanks to a huge quad-slot cooling design, the heatsink can easily handle the heat output of the RTX 3070 GPU—temperatures are as low as 66°C while fully loaded, and almost inaudible. These results are with the “quiet” BIOS, which is the default setting, unlike all other ASUS graphics cards using the “Performance” setting by default. Personally, I feel like making the “quiet” BIOS the default is the better choice, as the thermal and performance differences are negligible on most cards. It’s similar here. With the “Performance” BIOS activated, the card reached 60°C instead of 66°C—besides the number, there is no difference. Noise levels go up a bit, to 26 dBA, which is still very quiet. As expected, idle-fan stop is supported by the ASUS RTX 3070 Noctua. The fans will stop in idle, light gaming, productivity and Internet browsing for the perfect noise-free experience.

We introduced our apples-to-apples heatsink testing a few months ago, and it helps conclusive determine the cooling capability of a heatsink while taking the rest of the card out of the equation. Here, the RTX 3070 Noctua achieves impressive results, too. The cooler is better than any Founders Edition cooler NVIDIA ever made with the exception of the RTX 3090 Founders Edition. This is somewhat expected considering the huge quad-slot form factor, but it’s also confirmation that the magic is not only in the Noctua fans, but also the ASUS heatsink design. It also means that similar characteristics can be achieved by other graphics card vendors even without Noctua as long as they are willing to go beyond the triple-slot thickness. Multi-GPU setups are dead in 2021, so I’m not concerned about the physical size of the card at all.