 Now, wait a minute. This may very well be the quietest air-cooled GPU in its class, but enthusiasts have been bolting full-size case fans to their GPUs 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? And we'll find out who our sponsor is. Thanks to G.Skill for sponsoring this video. G.Skill just announced their latest flagship DDR5 kits, the Trident Z5 series. These extreme performance DDR5 kits are designed for 12th gen Intel Core processors and the Z690 chipset platform. Find out more at the link in the video description. I mean, it's kind of cheating, isn't it? ASUS and Noctua's performance claims may very well pan out in the end, but the thing is comically large. Look at this. 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 a quadruple slot card is you're gonna 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 NF-A12 desktop fans on the thing, but they actually made the shroud 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 and make sure that under no circumstances would a Noctua-cooled graphics card not perform properly. Cause you can see that right there gives these fans quite a lot of buffer to take in air cause you can't have anything right next to it. You know, I actually kind of like the look. Well, yeah, I just, I think that's gonna be a bit of a controversial take. It's kind of sexy in like an ugly way, you know? Does that make sense? You know? Man, it's like having a really scary stuffed animal. You know, it's like scary cute. It's ugly sexy. 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 Noctua to do more than just strap their fans to a graphics card though. Now they claim they did, but Der 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 sink component don't appear to hold any water. It seems to be exactly the same heat sink from ASUS's RTX 3070 Tough Gaming. Let's play count the slots, shall we? So you got your one, two, three. Hold on. One, two, three, four. Four slots, but can I actually install a card right next to it in that fifth one? Holy snikies. It's actually gonna push it a little bit. And it's not even, this isn't even a long enough card to interfere with the peak of the bulge. 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 complement of PCI Express slots like they used to. They'll have just one 16X 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 gonna be installing anything in it anyway, I guess you might as well have a thick, chunky SGB 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 gonna call this a regular RTX 3070 with a triple fan cooler on here is gonna get us in terms of acoustic results. To be clear, this is a thick card and around 44 decibels while turboing to 1950 megahertz in Doom Eternal with GPU temps sitting at 63 degrees on the die and 73 degrees on the hotspot, very respectable. The Noctua one's just gonna have to do better if it's gonna take up a fourth slot. As we shut down the system here, we'll get a good opportunity to show you guys our noise floor here in the workshop with the HVAC off. So I'm gonna shut up for a second here. At 28, 29 decibels, it's not an Anacoa 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 back here is what used to pass for 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 the card here. It 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 you that it's under the noise floor in the room and the fans went and turned off because 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 sayonara, zero RPM gaming. And number two is that Roman Derbauer observed that there was some coil wine 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. 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 gonna get within earshot of the coil wine and put this panel in between us. Ooh. Confirmed then, as long as you've got it in a case like a normal person, the coil wine's 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 out of here, boomer. Okay. Let's have a look at FitzRudy 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. The fans are freaking off. Of course, Rocket League, not as demanding as Doom Eternal. Let's fire that up next. And we didn't even check the acoustics. Okay, turn back on, come on. It's open. Oh, excellent. I don't exactly know what you wanted. But I took out all the screws. Yes. Oh, okay, bye. No, you're not done. You want the fans gone too? Yeah. Okay. Because I'm gonna put my own fans on it. Uh-oh. 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, because it's gonna 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 a Levin blade fan or something like that. So it hits your finger a lot more frequently per revolution, if that makes sense. I don't think it's gonna heat up any more than it did. That is outstanding. No crazy frequency on this GPU. We're 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 any more at all. Here, everybody. Yeah, we're right back to the noise floor. You should note though, you're not gonna 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 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? Go for it. All right, I'm gonna position my fan. I'm doing some careful simulation engineering here. I'm gonna 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 can put that right there. I'm gonna make myself a little kind of shroud, okay? Okay, so that's gonna go right there. So we don't, wait, no, no, I can't do that. No, I'm not gonna 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 gotta come out. Wait, no, no, no, yeah, no, no, no, not on this side. Yeah, no, I was right in the first place, dude. Okay, only on this side where there's pass through. This is so stupid. Stupid like a fox. Sure. Look, all right, let's see you engineer a cooler in 10 minutes. What do the kids say? PogChamp? Is this PogChamp GPU edition? Okay. I mean, in fairness, mine really doesn't look that much uglier. And, and my design is quite a 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. Ooh, I have an idea. I could go into the BIOS and reconfigure the fan curves, but I got WAN show in just a few minutes here. So I'll just throw a couple of noise adapters on them. Let's go ahead and get an acoustic reading now. It's not gonna 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... Just like the official knock to a GPU, we are below the noise floor of this room, which is around 29 decibels, which is really freaking quiet. But 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 gonna get away with using low noise adapters if you want to have proper performance. So dang, good product Asus Noctua, good job guys. And good job Linus, segueing to our sponsor. Ting Mobile has new rates that make it easier than ever to see how much you can save by switching. They have unlimited talk and text for $10, data plan starting at $15, and then there's their set 12 plan, which has 12 gigs of data for 35 bucks, and they've even got unlimited data for $45 a month. If you liked their previous pay for only what you use plans, they're still there, they're called Ting Mobile's flex plans now and they charge just $5 per gig. Data can even be shared if you have a family plan so you can connect more phones to save more. You get the same nationwide coverage in the US and award-winning customer service, and pretty much any phone will work with Ting Mobile. So don't wait, they've got the perfect plan for everybody, no matter what your needs are, check them out at linus.ting.com and you can get a $25 service credit. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out our previous GPU upgrade video where we used a real add-in GPU cooling product to achieve significantly better results. Good job, guys.