The Knock to a Fan Boy's Paradise: A Review of the Noctua Edition RTX 3070

As I sat at my desk, wearing my favorite shirt, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation as I unboxed the new Noctua Edition RTX 3070. The moment I laid eyes on this card, I knew it was going to be special - not just because of its sleek design, but also because of the rumors that had been circulating in the community about this particular model. And now, after spending some quality time with this card, I can confidently say that Noctua has outdone themselves once again.

One of the first things that struck me was the performance mode on this card. Even though there were some lower peaks here and there, the overall performance was still extremely impressive. The power temperatures were where the knock would just blow everything else out of the water, and honestly, it's hard to argue with that when you consider the price point and the Noctua branding slapped on this thing, even in its quiet mode. It's by far the best here and performance mode takes things to the next level with temperatures that are below the 60-degree marks right through the end of the test - that's pretty impressive.

But what really sets this card apart is its noise levels. Considering our ambient noise level of the room was only 35 decibels, the numbers here are the best I've ever seen from a GPU period, probably ever. It's by far the quietest card here, and I mean asus set out to make the noctua edition one of the quietest GPUs around and that's exactly what they've done. So, you could say it's sort of mission accomplished.

However, after some initial excitement and amazement at these numbers, I couldn't help but wonder if this card was really doing enough in terms of overclocking potential. Overclocking this thing i always cross my fingers that it would shine so let's check out those numbers too. Well, with a bit of massaging, i was able to get the knock to a card moving along at an average power consumption of 258 watts which resulted in a clock speed of 2.15 gigahertz even then though i was capped by asus's built-in limit since temperature only hit around 58 degrees.

The real story here is again the acoustics - this card is absolutely whisper quiet and will probably be one of the quietest things in your entire system. Now, moving on to performance, I'm not going to focus too much on frame rates because they're exactly what you'd expect for a mildly pre-overclocked RTX 3070 we've all seen it a million times before while overclocking does add a bit more in the frame rate department - what hurts is that i'm sure that it's got more to offer if we were able to push it further.

But, as I delved deeper into my testing, I realized that this is endemic of GPUs nowadays - they're simply designed to operate at almost peak levels in stock form and getting huge overclocking headroom means looking towards hardware mods that will completely nuke your warranty. Well, i guess that pretty much sums it up.

As for the design of this card, I must say that I love the look of it - it's a knock to a fan boy and there are a lot of people out there who are also noctua fans who are going to absolutely love the look of this thing. It's a must-have on that note, but, at the same time, I have to look at something like the founders edition RTX 3070 founders edition now - this thing you could tell it has been precision engineered.

Look at the size of it compared to this noctua card and yes, it's a little bit louder, it's a little bit harder and it's a little bit slower but when you look at the two together you can tell engineering versus well, it's not necessarily laziness - it's just a little bit more i guess you would call it conservative. Yes, they upscaled the tough card - they slapped a pair of noctua fans on it - and I'm not really going to fault them for that because they know the market that they're catering to.

On the other hand, what excites me the most about this card in the community and on youtube is the fact that noctua and asus i'm sure they're taking notes and this might lay the foundation for the next generation maybe a ground-up noctua and asus designed card amazing cooling more compact more precision engineering. So, if that's coming down, i am even more excited and i hope it happens so.

So, there you have it - my thoughts on the Noctua Edition RTX 3070 in all its glory. It's a fantastic piece of hardware, with incredible acoustics, amazing temperatures, but also some limitations when it comes to overclocking potential. Nevertheless, if you're looking for a quiet and powerful GPU that won't break the bank, this card is definitely worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell hello everybody mike here with horror canucks and it's been a little while since i've been in front of the camera maybe you've missed me maybe you haven't but i've been on vacation and during that vacation i sort of picked this up this is a brand new shirt and there's a lot of opinions about it personally i love it cameraman i love it he loves it too my girlfriend on the other hand she doesn't get it she absolutely hates it she actually said that it looks like one of my grandmother's dishcloths but it's a great analogy this shirt is great analogy for this graphics card that arrived when i came back so this is the rtx 3070 noc2 edition from asus now there's a lot of opinions about this thing some people hate it some people love it some people don't get it personally i'm a fan i absolutely love the beige look but with all of that being said i wanted to get a little bit more into the information and some testing about this card and yes i know i'm a little bit late here because i was on vacation there's some other content out there about it but i wanted to talk a little bit more about what i found whether or not i'm impressed or disappointed and a bunch of other things right after a message from our sponsor the be quiet shadow rock 3 it won't block your memory thanks to the offset construction it will not sound like a hurricane thanks to the quiet shadow wings 2 fan it will give you a peace of mind with exceptional cooling easy installation and the interesting bi-color design check it out below alright so about the asus rtx 3070 strix oc edition now the first thing i wanted to mention is something that was a little bit concerned about and that's the fact that they might have gone ahead and just slapped a pair of noctua fans on one of their standard coolers i'm going to talk about that in a little bit because some of those fears were sort of confirmed now on the other hand this is actually not the first time that noctua and asus have teamed up as a matter of fact years ago and four years now their ryujin cpu coolers or their aio coolers have actually been using noctua ppc fans so this sort of team up isn't unprecedented but what is unprecedented is something that i wasn't prepared for here and that is the thickness of this boy look at this this is not two this is not three this is not four slots this is four point three slots high now that's not really going to cause an issue if you mount it into your case in sort of like a standard orientation and you have that height below your first pcie slot but what i found is that if you're trying to mount this bad boy vertically to actually see those fans straight on because heck that's what you're paying for here right this thing is going to slam right up against the side panel of 99.999 percent of the cases on the market and the other 0.1 percent there isn't actually going to be enough airflow room between the side panel and the fans for there to be actually any air sucked into the fin array i mean it's ginormous and simple numbers well they just don't do it any justice but here they are anyways the size really stands out when i ended up comparing it actually to some of the other rtx 3070s i've got here in the office just look at it next to the founders edition the evga rtx 3070 xc and the little guy the rtx 3070 itx from zotac that's also called the twin edge and the biggest thing that i found is its weight the first time i hefted this thing this feels like a ton it's actually 1575 grams and whatever that is in pounds for you americans it's right up here the editor who's behind the camera he's gonna take care of that it's chunky it's heavy no it does not come with an anti-sag bracket and that's something you need to take into account but what does all that mass actually gets you well from a design perspective the rtx 3070 knock to edition is pretty straightforward and no it does not use a knock to a design heatsink well not really while noctua have had some feedback supposedly in the design this is a pretty simple modification of asus's tough rtx 3070 heatsink design all they did is space the heat pipes a bit further apart and gave just a little bit more cooling mass by adding width and height to the fin array then of course they slapped a pair of noctos legendary nf 812 fans to the heatsink gave it a new shroud design and well guess what that's pretty much it there's also a few other callbacks to tough rtx 3070 or should i say they just copied the thing for example the back placed the exact same one but now it's a simple brown tinted color and there's a few small visual changes to make it look more noctua i mean this thing even has the same bio switch as the tough edition with the performance and quiet modes the nice thing about this design are the easily swapped out fans but i'll be honest with you i'm not sure that's something you'll actually want to do because these are actually two of the best fans on the market right now but maybe this points towards a better future where more manufacturers explore using standard fans that can be easily swapped out in case something goes wrong but make no mistake about it this heatsink for an rtx 3070 is absolutely hilariously oversized there's no way the rtx 3070 would ever need this kind of cooling capacity unless it was seriously overclocked balls to the wall but is it the answer to that is not really because what asus and noctu are trying to do here is really fine tune the performance the looks and above all else the noise profile they're going for the quietest heatsink on the market and now that means that they had to sacrifice a little bit when it came to the oc model and how far they pre-overclocked this thing so even with all of this cooling potential this isn't the fastest highest overclocked rtx 3070 around far from it actually the specs that you're getting here are exactly the same as the rtx 3070 tough i'm guessing asus simply didn't want this competing with their higher end rog series that go for huge huge premiums but still it would have been nice to get something anything more than that tough series part and for the privilege of owning this beige card what do you pay well the price is 760 us dollars now i know that is a far cry away from what nvidia launched the rtx 3070 at but we cannot forget these days first of all there's two 30 dollar noctual fans slapped onto this thing or maybe this 55 if you buy them in a package of two the other thing you have to take into account is we're in one of those situations where transport costs have gone through the roof component costs have gone through the roof supply and demand is absolutely batshit crazy right now so yes those much less expensive rtx 3070s are now premium priced i hate justifying it like that but it's just the fact of the market right now but i also wanted to talk of course about performance because you are paying a premium for this thing if you can actually find it so in order to see how it performs against some of the competition what we have here in the office is the rtx 3070 founders edition the rtx 3070 twin edge that i talked about before and the rtx 3070 xc from evga i'm gonna put all those up against this to see how far asus was actually able to push this out of the box and then yes i want to talk about overclocking because that is the interesting part here starting off with real-time power consumption and the founders edition averaged 215 watts while the zotac twin edge wasn't actually too far behind at 212 watts they really needed to limit that card because of how small it is and it's relatively limited cooling capacity meanwhile the evga ended up at 233 watts which is just shy of knoxville's performance mode at 237 watts with a peak of about 247 watts and that quiet mode though that was pretty interesting because it had about the same power envelope as the performance mode even though there were some lower peaks here and there even though there wasn't much separating the power temperatures are where the knock would just blows everything else out of the water and honestly it better given the price and the fact that you've got the noctua branding slapped on this thing even in its quiet mode it's by far the best here and performance mode takes things to the next level with temperatures that are below the 60 degree marks right through the end of the test so that's pretty impressive but does it even matter when it comes to clock speeds and the answer to that is no not really that extra shot of juice and the lower temperatures actually didn't end up leading to one iota more amount of clock speed headroom than any of the other cards it's actually beaten in the frequency department by that tiny zotac of all things and it barely and i mean barely edges out the reference card and i know to a lot of you given the size of this thing that will be disappointing but hold on a second when it comes to noise this is where the knock to addition absolutely shines considering our ambient noise level of the room is only 35 decibels the numbers here are the best i've ever seen from a gpu period probably ever and it's by far the quietest card here i mean asus set out to make the noctua edition one of the quietest gpus around and that's exactly what they've done so you could call it sort of mission accomplished but is it really mission accomplished and that's something that i needed to sort of like think to myself the first time i saw those numbers it has great acoustics actually whisper quiet it has amazing temperatures but i honestly wish that asus would have played a little bit more with those clock speeds because it has all of this cooling capacity but it doesn't do a damn thing more than something like the tough addition but what about overclocking overclocking this thing i always cross my fingers that it would shine so let's check out those numbers too well with a bit of that massaging i was able to get the knock to a card moving along at an average power consumption of 258 watts which resulted in a clock speed of 2.15 gigahertz even then though i was capped by asus's built-in limit since temperature only hit around 58 degrees but the real story here is again the acoustics this card is absolutely whisper quiet and will probably be one of the quietest things in your entire system and now moving on to performance i'm not going to focus too much on frame rates because they're exactly what you'd expect for a mildly pre-overclock rtx 3070 we've all seen it a million times before while overclocking does add a bit more in the frame rate department what hurts to know is i'm sure that it's got more to offer if we were able to push it further but the problem is endemic of gpus nowadays they're simply designed to operate at almost the peak levels in stock form and getting huge overclocking headroom means looking towards hardware mods that will completely nuke your warranty well i guess that pretty much sums it up and you know what i am a little bit on the fence about this one and i think that goes back to my shirt analogy from the beginning of this video i love the look of this card i'm a knock to a fan boy and i think that there's a lot of people out there who are also noctua fans who are gonna absolutely love the look of this thing and it's a must-have on the other hand i look at something like the founders edition the rtx 3070 founders edition now this thing you could tell it has been precision engineered look at the size of it compared to this noctual card and yes it's a little bit louder it's a little bit harder and it's a little bit slower but when you look at the two together you can tell engineering versus well it's not necessarily laziness it's just a little bit more i guess you would call it conservative yes they upscaled the tough card they slapped a pair of noctua fans on it and i'm not really going to fault them for that because they know the market that they're catering to on the other hand what excites me the most about this and the excitement generated about this card in the community and on youtube is the fact that noctua and asus i'm sure they're taking notes and this might lay the foundation for the next generation maybe a ground up noctua and asus designed card amazing cooling more compact more precision engineering so if that's coming down i am even more excited and i hope it happens so that being said i'm mike with hardware canucks i hope you enjoyed this i hope you like my shirt because i do and i'll see you in the next onewell hello everybody mike here with horror canucks and it's been a little while since i've been in front of the camera maybe you've missed me maybe you haven't but i've been on vacation and during that vacation i sort of picked this up this is a brand new shirt and there's a lot of opinions about it personally i love it cameraman i love it he loves it too my girlfriend on the other hand she doesn't get it she absolutely hates it she actually said that it looks like one of my grandmother's dishcloths but it's a great analogy this shirt is great analogy for this graphics card that arrived when i came back so this is the rtx 3070 noc2 edition from asus now there's a lot of opinions about this thing some people hate it some people love it some people don't get it personally i'm a fan i absolutely love the beige look but with all of that being said i wanted to get a little bit more into the information and some testing about this card and yes i know i'm a little bit late here because i was on vacation there's some other content out there about it but i wanted to talk a little bit more about what i found whether or not i'm impressed or disappointed and a bunch of other things right after a message from our sponsor the be quiet shadow rock 3 it won't block your memory thanks to the offset construction it will not sound like a hurricane thanks to the quiet shadow wings 2 fan it will give you a peace of mind with exceptional cooling easy installation and the interesting bi-color design check it out below alright so about the asus rtx 3070 strix oc edition now the first thing i wanted to mention is something that was a little bit concerned about and that's the fact that they might have gone ahead and just slapped a pair of noctua fans on one of their standard coolers i'm going to talk about that in a little bit because some of those fears were sort of confirmed now on the other hand this is actually not the first time that noctua and asus have teamed up as a matter of fact years ago and four years now their ryujin cpu coolers or their aio coolers have actually been using noctua ppc fans so this sort of team up isn't unprecedented but what is unprecedented is something that i wasn't prepared for here and that is the thickness of this boy look at this this is not two this is not three this is not four slots this is four point three slots high now that's not really going to cause an issue if you mount it into your case in sort of like a standard orientation and you have that height below your first pcie slot but what i found is that if you're trying to mount this bad boy vertically to actually see those fans straight on because heck that's what you're paying for here right this thing is going to slam right up against the side panel of 99.999 percent of the cases on the market and the other 0.1 percent there isn't actually going to be enough airflow room between the side panel and the fans for there to be actually any air sucked into the fin array i mean it's ginormous and simple numbers well they just don't do it any justice but here they are anyways the size really stands out when i ended up comparing it actually to some of the other rtx 3070s i've got here in the office just look at it next to the founders edition the evga rtx 3070 xc and the little guy the rtx 3070 itx from zotac that's also called the twin edge and the biggest thing that i found is its weight the first time i hefted this thing this feels like a ton it's actually 1575 grams and whatever that is in pounds for you americans it's right up here the editor who's behind the camera he's gonna take care of that it's chunky it's heavy no it does not come with an anti-sag bracket and that's something you need to take into account but what does all that mass actually gets you well from a design perspective the rtx 3070 knock to edition is pretty straightforward and no it does not use a knock to a design heatsink well not really while noctua have had some feedback supposedly in the design this is a pretty simple modification of asus's tough rtx 3070 heatsink design all they did is space the heat pipes a bit further apart and gave just a little bit more cooling mass by adding width and height to the fin array then of course they slapped a pair of noctos legendary nf 812 fans to the heatsink gave it a new shroud design and well guess what that's pretty much it there's also a few other callbacks to tough rtx 3070 or should i say they just copied the thing for example the back placed the exact same one but now it's a simple brown tinted color and there's a few small visual changes to make it look more noctua i mean this thing even has the same bio switch as the tough edition with the performance and quiet modes the nice thing about this design are the easily swapped out fans but i'll be honest with you i'm not sure that's something you'll actually want to do because these are actually two of the best fans on the market right now but maybe this points towards a better future where more manufacturers explore using standard fans that can be easily swapped out in case something goes wrong but make no mistake about it this heatsink for an rtx 3070 is absolutely hilariously oversized there's no way the rtx 3070 would ever need this kind of cooling capacity unless it was seriously overclocked balls to the wall but is it the answer to that is not really because what asus and noctu are trying to do here is really fine tune the performance the looks and above all else the noise profile they're going for the quietest heatsink on the market and now that means that they had to sacrifice a little bit when it came to the oc model and how far they pre-overclocked this thing so even with all of this cooling potential this isn't the fastest highest overclocked rtx 3070 around far from it actually the specs that you're getting here are exactly the same as the rtx 3070 tough i'm guessing asus simply didn't want this competing with their higher end rog series that go for huge huge premiums but still it would have been nice to get something anything more than that tough series part and for the privilege of owning this beige card what do you pay well the price is 760 us dollars now i know that is a far cry away from what nvidia launched the rtx 3070 at but we cannot forget these days first of all there's two 30 dollar noctual fans slapped onto this thing or maybe this 55 if you buy them in a package of two the other thing you have to take into account is we're in one of those situations where transport costs have gone through the roof component costs have gone through the roof supply and demand is absolutely batshit crazy right now so yes those much less expensive rtx 3070s are now premium priced i hate justifying it like that but it's just the fact of the market right now but i also wanted to talk of course about performance because you are paying a premium for this thing if you can actually find it so in order to see how it performs against some of the competition what we have here in the office is the rtx 3070 founders edition the rtx 3070 twin edge that i talked about before and the rtx 3070 xc from evga i'm gonna put all those up against this to see how far asus was actually able to push this out of the box and then yes i want to talk about overclocking because that is the interesting part here starting off with real-time power consumption and the founders edition averaged 215 watts while the zotac twin edge wasn't actually too far behind at 212 watts they really needed to limit that card because of how small it is and it's relatively limited cooling capacity meanwhile the evga ended up at 233 watts which is just shy of knoxville's performance mode at 237 watts with a peak of about 247 watts and that quiet mode though that was pretty interesting because it had about the same power envelope as the performance mode even though there were some lower peaks here and there even though there wasn't much separating the power temperatures are where the knock would just blows everything else out of the water and honestly it better given the price and the fact that you've got the noctua branding slapped on this thing even in its quiet mode it's by far the best here and performance mode takes things to the next level with temperatures that are below the 60 degree marks right through the end of the test so that's pretty impressive but does it even matter when it comes to clock speeds and the answer to that is no not really that extra shot of juice and the lower temperatures actually didn't end up leading to one iota more amount of clock speed headroom than any of the other cards it's actually beaten in the frequency department by that tiny zotac of all things and it barely and i mean barely edges out the reference card and i know to a lot of you given the size of this thing that will be disappointing but hold on a second when it comes to noise this is where the knock to addition absolutely shines considering our ambient noise level of the room is only 35 decibels the numbers here are the best i've ever seen from a gpu period probably ever and it's by far the quietest card here i mean asus set out to make the noctua edition one of the quietest gpus around and that's exactly what they've done so you could call it sort of mission accomplished but is it really mission accomplished and that's something that i needed to sort of like think to myself the first time i saw those numbers it has great acoustics actually whisper quiet it has amazing temperatures but i honestly wish that asus would have played a little bit more with those clock speeds because it has all of this cooling capacity but it doesn't do a damn thing more than something like the tough addition but what about overclocking overclocking this thing i always cross my fingers that it would shine so let's check out those numbers too well with a bit of that massaging i was able to get the knock to a card moving along at an average power consumption of 258 watts which resulted in a clock speed of 2.15 gigahertz even then though i was capped by asus's built-in limit since temperature only hit around 58 degrees but the real story here is again the acoustics this card is absolutely whisper quiet and will probably be one of the quietest things in your entire system and now moving on to performance i'm not going to focus too much on frame rates because they're exactly what you'd expect for a mildly pre-overclock rtx 3070 we've all seen it a million times before while overclocking does add a bit more in the frame rate department what hurts to know is i'm sure that it's got more to offer if we were able to push it further but the problem is endemic of gpus nowadays they're simply designed to operate at almost the peak levels in stock form and getting huge overclocking headroom means looking towards hardware mods that will completely nuke your warranty well i guess that pretty much sums it up and you know what i am a little bit on the fence about this one and i think that goes back to my shirt analogy from the beginning of this video i love the look of this card i'm a knock to a fan boy and i think that there's a lot of people out there who are also noctua fans who are gonna absolutely love the look of this thing and it's a must-have on the other hand i look at something like the founders edition the rtx 3070 founders edition now this thing you could tell it has been precision engineered look at the size of it compared to this noctual card and yes it's a little bit louder it's a little bit harder and it's a little bit slower but when you look at the two together you can tell engineering versus well it's not necessarily laziness it's just a little bit more i guess you would call it conservative yes they upscaled the tough card they slapped a pair of noctua fans on it and i'm not really going to fault them for that because they know the market that they're catering to on the other hand what excites me the most about this and the excitement generated about this card in the community and on youtube is the fact that noctua and asus i'm sure they're taking notes and this might lay the foundation for the next generation maybe a ground up noctua and asus designed card amazing cooling more compact more precision engineering so if that's coming down i am even more excited and i hope it happens so that being said i'm mike with hardware canucks i hope you enjoyed this i hope you like my shirt because i do and i'll see you in the next one\n"