RTX 3070 ASUS x Noctua OC | Review

I tested the RTX3070 Asus x Noctua and was amazed by the test results. Before we start, let me say that this card is an absolute beast in terms of cooling performance.

Feb 25, 2022

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RTX 3070 ASUS x Noctua OC - a silent beast.

Background

I upgraded from my GTX1070 MSI ARMOR OC which is still up to this day a very good card and enough to play the newest games with high settings. Yeah I know, the prices are insane and the 1070 was good enough to stick with for further years. But as a silent enthusiast, you don’t just settle down while you can hear fans. You try everything to optimize airflow and fan speed. Some games even run on 4K@60Hz pretty fine, newer games like Halo Infinite will run on FHD or WQHD at moderate settings, which is absolutely fine to play.

Mostly well-designed and optimized games like DOOM will run butter smooth at very high settings and even WQHD or 4K. But often, games are not that well engineered and not optimized, e.g. HUDs and resolutions often are static to the resolution you set. Halo Infinite or Call of Duty Warzone don’t: You can set a resolution of 4K and a render-resolution of maybe FHD. This will ensure sharp texts and icons while the game itself is rendered lower.

Personally, I love these settings and hopefully many future games will also do. Other games like STAR WARS Jedi Fallen Order have a performance depending on the graphic settings and not on the resolution. If you switch between WQHD and 4K, you won’t notice much of a difference in performance, e.g. 4K will maybe require ~20% more performance from your GPU. However, changing from medium to high/“epic” game settings, you will see a much bigger performance requirement between ~40-50%. Other games are often vice versa. So, all of these factors make game benchmarks a little hard to analyze since not every game is well balanced - in fact, mostly they are not. The best optimization I have ever witnessed is in DOOM (2016) and DOOM Eternal (2020). The engineers did a extremely good job on these first-person shooters which I wish most games would also have because the performance is drastically changing your gaming experience.

Specs

Hardware

What I really like about this card is the lifespan. The cooling can be mounted off and replaced by some other fans, maybe some black ones from Noctua or RGB fans, which was done by some YouTubers. You can mod a lot here and also clean this card properly by mounting off the fans.

Test results

Basically, we are talking about the performance of a RTX3070 Ti which is pretty neat for a stock TDP of 220 + 20W but this is no wonder since this card is overclocked by stock. But wait, there is more. Undervolting this beast give you a lot for less power consumption. I jumped into MSI Afterburner and tweaked a little bit. I went with 850mV @ 1830 MHz which is very stable and after six weeks, no game or program crashed yet. I tried 825mV @ 1830 MHz but it felt unstable and some lagging occured in the overall experience of Windows 11. But here we are talking about undervolting while still overclocking this beast! You could go down to maybe 1700 MHz and undervolt furthermore to reach some TDP of approx. 140W. This card will be extremely silent yet powerful and if you are not 4K + Highest Settings gaming and prefer silence, you will have so much fun with this card. I mean, yes, it is very silent. But depending on how much silent enthusiast you are, you will maybe hear or notice the fans on full load. In the practial real life, this card is not noticable since almost always you will hear something else more than this card. Also the airflow in your case takes huge impact on this, of course.

I hope this is only the first of many cards co-engineered by Noctua and I am looking forwand to some black.chromax Editions of these!