Reviews & awards

The three G2 fans shut down when the card is under 50 °C. They start back up again at 55 °C. Even when this happens, they generate very little noise—not all that noticeable when I'm sat at my desk playing a game. A large fan can shift more air at slower speeds compared to smaller fan, and the Noctua Edition has very large fans compared to most. With low RPM and low noise, my test bench is actually too loud to pick up a specific reading for the Noctua card on my noise meter; the card operates quietly enough as to fade into the background hum of the PC.

As for temperatures, it's nothing short of exceptional that the GB203 GPU was never seen above 61 °C during an extended run of Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition. That's 11 °C lower than the MSI RTX 5080 Ventus 3X OC White, which is nothing short of spectacular, and moreover is not particularly impactful on performance—the two cards performed more or less the same in many tests.

Though what is impressive is that, even when overclocked and drawing more power and running at a significantly higher clock speed, the Noctua Edition kept its cool. Temperature difference in my testing was negligible, which suggests thermals are not going to be any sort of restriction on most realistic overclocking aspirations.