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 not to us performance claims may very
well pan out in the end but the thing is
comically large look at this
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 like
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 a knock to his idea or something to have this part sticking out
here to make sure that under no circumstances would a knock to a cooled
graphics card not perform properly because you can see
that right there gives these fans quite a lot of buffer to take in air because
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 going to be a bit of a controversial take it's kind of
sexy and like uh an ugly way you know
does that make sense you know man it's like that like having a really
like 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'd sort of expected october 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 knocked to a you
know painstakingly redesigned this heatsink component
don't appear to hold any water it seems to be exactly the same heat sink from
ASUS 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 shnikeys it's actually going to push it a little bit
and it's not even this isn't even a long enough card to interfere with the the
peak of the bulge it's like 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 going to be installing anything in it anyway i guess
you might as well have a thick chunky ass GPU 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 uh 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 and do maternal with GPU temps sitting at 63 degrees on the die
and 73 degrees on the hot spot 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 anechoic 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 you know 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 knock to a 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 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 heatsink 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 der bauer observed that there was some coil whine
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 noctu and ASUS had been to design a board that managed
extremely quiet power delivery i need a piece of metal like a side panel ah 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
going to get within earshot of the coil wine and put this panel in between us
confirmed then as long as you've got it in a case like a normal person the coil
wind'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 if it's reached equilibrium yet
wow has it ever
55 degrees with 66 on the hot spot
and that's clocked at 19.50 just like we saw before my fans are off
the fans are freaking off of course rocket league
not as demanding as do maternal 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 know i exactly know what you wanted
i found all the screws yes
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
yeah that's the thing that happens when you pull off the female receptacle
and you're trying to remove the male connector uh well it's fine because it's going to
go back onto there anyway whoops
i've seen dogs get stuck together
wow what a weird thing to say um here you go
wow
that sounds like it's spinning really fast but this is like an 11 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
and 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 anymore at all
here everyone shh
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 things still wouldn't thermal throttle
not to mention the fans hadn't even wrapped 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 knock to a 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
all right i'm uh i'm gonna position my fan i'm doing some careful simulation
engineering here i'm going to position my fan right at the edge of this
heatsink because i want to take advantage of as much of this
pass-through cooling as i can so i'm going to put that to put that
right there i'm going to make myself a little uh kind of shroud okay okay so
that's gonna go right there so we don't uh wait no no i can't do that no i'm not
gonna make myself any kind of shroud the only
uh hmm yeah what is the best way to take advantage of this because this is where
the air has got to come out wait no no yeah no no not on this side
yeah i know 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
um sure
look all right let's see you engineer uh
a cooler in 10 minutes what do the kids say podcamp is this
popchamp GPU edition
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 wancho 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 going to change because the fan speed is not tied to GPU temperatures in
any way which could be dangerous unless our cooler was way overkill which i
suspect this probably is so here i'll shut up let's uh
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 hot spot 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 going to get away
with using low noise adapters if you want to have proper performance
so dang good product jesus Noctua good job guys
and good job Linus segwaying to our sponsor
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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