OMG, a two fan GPU.
Oh, finally.
GPU makers. What are you doing? It's the
same thing every generation. Massive,
carefully designed heat sinks, and then you go ruin it by slapping these dinky
$3 fans on them to try and keep everything cool. You might not realize
it, but those fans are one of the most common points of failure on a graphics
card. And with most of them either too difficult to take apart or impossible to
find replacements for a lot of the time your only options are to throw the
graphics card away or rip the whole shroud off and zip tie on whatever fans
you've got lying around. Well, Noctua must have been paying attention because
they did basically that with the help of ASUS. They came together to create the
ultimate RTX30 series cards and they're
glorious. So, what better way to celebrate them than by building the all
Noctua gaming PC. So, hop on board,
baby. Next stop, Brown Town. Choo choo.
It's no secret that here at LT, we are giant
enthusiasts of Noctua products. You'll find them in just about every machine we
build here at the office. And if our staff aren't going for an RGB look at
home, you can bet that they're using Noctua products for their zero
compromises approach to performance and reliability. And it's with zero
compromises in mind that we began our Noctua PC by finding an excuse to use
the biggest fan they officially offer.
This 200 mm absolute unit of a cooling
fan. There aren't actually a ton of cases out there that support this size.
Even then, you have to be careful because this fan is 30 mm thick. That is
5 more millime than the standard 25. We're going to have this and everything
that we've used linked in the video description below. So, just because a
case comes with 200 mm fan support from the factory does not mean that it will
support Noctuas as replacements. Looking at you, Lean Lee. Now, obviously a plain
black case on its own wasn't good enough for a machine like this. So, we had our
resident Da Vinci work his magic with the paint booth. And wow, does this ever
look amazing. Shout out Nicholas for really pushing this build to the next
level. Look at this. We've even got Noctua themed back PCI covers. I just
realized I never actually named the case we selected. It's the Masterbox H500
ARGB from Cooler Master. And the reason we chose it, aside from it fitting our
200 mm fans, is that this build is all about performance and air flow. And it
certainly has that with a full mesh front panel that supports not just one
but two of our 200 mm fans. Look at
that. Isn't that incredible? And a large top vent complete with magnetic fan
filter that supports another two 140 mm
fans. And finally, a single 120 mm
exhaust at the back. Okay. Ah, the
process for installing these is a little fun. You got to pop the
pop the front panel off. Just like that. You got this nice little mesh dome.
Actually love this from an airflow perspective. And then this bad boy is
going to be an intake for us. And it's going to go a little something like fan
cable through. Oh my god. How are we going to get this fan cable through
here? I guess like that. Wow. Yep.
That's going to take up the whole space. All right. We're going to use Noctua's
cool little silicone vibration isolators to install our fans. So, you just pop
one of these bad boys through. A little something like this.
A little tedious, but does that look freaking amazing or
what? It's a giant wall of cooling
performance that you you simply cannot put anything in here that is not getting
a blast of fresh air. My one regret is
not enough knock to a fence. Thankfully, we have more. Oh, that's not
an NFA14, but that's okay cuz this is a
120 mil for the back. Oh my god, it's been so long since I've used these. I
forgot how you're supposed to install them. You put the silicone things in the
fan first. Oh, shoot. I need another one. Oh, so dumb. Yeah, they're all in
wrong. Oh my god, I had a brain brown
fart moment here. I totally installed
these wrong. It's been so long since I've used these. I normally just use
screws. You put the long side into the fan like I did, but you don't do it
through the case. That's what this little notch right here is for. That's
where the case sits. So, for those of you who were heading up until this point
in the video, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm fixing it. So then you Oh, wow. these
holes are really tight. Okay, it went. It went. Boy, was that ever a tight fit.
Look at that vibration isolating goodness. Look at all that play. It's a
good thing. Maybe there were people out there screeching that it's supposed to
go case side first when I did it the last time. I don't know, guys. I just
used screws so that I can talk about our screwdriver. ltstore.com.
Not yet. Soon. Yes. Got it. All right.
Now I have to line up four things at once instead of one at a time. And they're all flopsy. It's like getting a
flaccid thing into a tight thing, you know?
Hey, knock cable extensions. All right, let's put this back fan in. Yeah, with
properly sized holes, this is a fair bit easier. Boom. Done. Look at that.
Installed. This is glorious. I don't even want to cut off the little nubbins.
I say we keep them. Yeah, you can't even
see them. Our case wasn't the only piece that needed the Noctua treatment,
though, and our motherboard gave us plenty of opportunities to add color
accents. X570 boards in general, and our
Tough Series from ASUS is no exception, often include active cooling for the
chipset, giving us a perfect opportunity to replace that generic little whiny fan
with one from Noctua. So to begin our operation, we put our baby little 40x10
mm Noctua under the knife, removing everything but the impeller and the fan
blades themselves. Unfortunately, the heat sink shroud around the stock fan
didn't really accommodate our thicker Noctua replacement, which necessitated
some overly precise tormach action to make it fit. But you can see how well it
turned out. Enjoy it while you can, though, because by the time the build is done, you won't be able to see it
anymore. Oh boy. Well, that's not going to help. Turns out they do still need me
for something. Oh, I guess we went with a 1 TB WD blue because it didn't matter
what we chose because it's under a heat sink. If I was to choose an M.2 for this
build based on the overall theme of reliability, I would probably go with
something from Samsung. We don't have any experience with WD Blues dying in
particular, but based on the numbers out of Puget, Samsung makes shockingly
reliable SSDs. So, there's just a a
degree of trust there that I don't necessarily have for this particular
drive. On the subject of things you won't be able to see when we're done,
there was no way we were going to be satisfied with any old power supply. So,
knowing that Alex had already taken apart this AX600i
from Corsair, we thought it would be the perfect candidate for a little Noctua
operation. Little snip of the cables, followed by some solder action, and the
end result looks pretty darn near factory under this painted fan grill.
Not bad, right? I think we could have gone the Well, okay, there's some
there's some problems, but they're cosmetic. They're cosmetic. Okay, it's a
good thing we replaced it, too, because this fan ends up spinning up to its
highest RPM during boot. And the factory Corsair unit, in my opinion,
unacceptably loud. Easily the most noticeable one in the system. Though in
fairness to Corsair, it would have immediately spun down to like zero.
Okay, one thumb screw later. Power supply shroud comes off. It's actually a
very easy case to work in. Very standard. Oh, this feels so wrong. I
guess it doesn't really matter cuz we wouldn't see the fan anyway. It's
covered in this shroud. But okay, we'll
know it's there. Brandon, this is what I was thinking when I lost my train of
thought. Corsair used to include and apparently still does little magnetic
replacements for the labels. Look at that. Ha, clean. Now, we are still going
to cover it though. Little probing tip. If you want to save
yourself some hassle later, you can pre-install your modular cables on the
motherboard and then run these as you're installing
the board rather than once you've already put heat sinks and everything on
here and it's real difficult to get at them. Couple other things we should
probably install on the motherboard before going any further. We've got an
AMD Ryzen 7 5800 X3D. It may only have
eight cores, but damn it, it uses their 3D VCH and is the fastest gaming CPU in
their lineup. We'll get that boy popped in there. And we've actually got a
second SSD. This is the one you guys are meant to believe we're booting off of,
but it's mostly just for show. This is a Corsair MP600 SSD. So, not even like top
of the line anymore, but we just liked it because we could put it here and put
a little Noctua fan on it and plug it in like there. Unfortunately, there's
nothing Noctua about our 64 gig kit of
3600 megat transfer per second crucial ballistics memory. We can't even put a
Noctua cooler on it unless
we make our own by 3D printing it. Yes.
Oh lordy. It's not the most elegant thing in the world. We're using
motherboard screw holes. See that? Standard ATX screw holes to get this bad
boy on here. But boy is that RAM ever going to be silent. Silent RAM. It's all
like but but not muted.
Unfortunately, I managed to scuff our totally awesome professional rattle can
paint job a little bit here. But that's okay because I've got a little paint tip
for you guys. Spray some of your paint onto a plastic surface like this. Get a
little stick or something like that. Poke that in there. You can get some
little touch-ups going on in here. Come check this out, Brandon. How's that?
It won't have quite a perfect finish from 6 in, but from 6 ft, you'd never
notice it. So many things about this build feel out of water. But we finally
gotten to the CPU heat sink. And oh, come on. We got to go with the classic,
ladies and gentlemen. That's right. We
we actually obtained a black Noctua fan
and then replaced it with a brown and tan one because Noctua PC. Wait, Cryore
thermal compound. Get this out of my face. Can't do the old Noctua PC without
using Noctua thermal compound. Jeez.
I guess that's what I get for asking stupid questions like, "Where's the
thermal compound?" Gee, I don't know, Lionus. Maybe in the box for the cooler.
You know, it was actually a very Noctua inspired process by which we brought our
screwdriver to life. I remember having a conversation with their CEO where I
said, "Well, to make the best fans, you guys must have the best engineers." And
he kind of laughs and he goes, "Well, no, we have good engineers, but it's
more about giving them the time to do their best work." And that's why it's
taken 2 and 1/2 years to make a screwdriver. Oh my goodness. There you
go. All right. One CPU cable. Ah. Ah. Ah.
two CPU cableh.
Oh, come on. Where is the other one? Corsair has these these heat shrink
tubes on their cables that Ah, there we go. We had wanted to have cable mod
cables for this matching our Noctua color scheme, but unfortunately there
was a shipping delay and they weren't here in time. Those eight pins would not
go in if they were not pre-installed at all. For our first screw, we're going
top right, which means we're going to be using a custom length motherboard screw.
This is because it's got to go through that 3D printed RAM cooler. Oh yeah,
it's threaded. Nice. We're glossing over a lot of the
cabling, but the summary is lots of extensions, lots of Ysplitters. We've
got all of these fans plugged into the motherboard headers. Now, all we got to
do is get some LT Store cable ties. Now available in so many fun colors, though
unfortunately not brown. Now it's time
for the centerpiece of our build, the collab you did not know you needed, the
ASUS X Noctua RTX 3070. Wait, what are
we putting a 3070 in here for? GPU prices are way better now.
Let's go for the newer 3080 edition, shall we? It looks exactly the same, but
that's not a bad thing. Everything about this design is performance first. From
the back plate to the massive 120 mm
cooling fans to the 4.3
slot thickness. Though I do have to say I wonder how much of the performance of
it is Noctuous fan engineering and how much is just that it has a massive
massive heat sink with ASUS added extra clearance here for the heat sink so that
the airflow could kind of blow out around the card better.
Oh, probably lots. I'd buy this one
100%. Brandon, you don't get it. You don't buy Noctua components for the
looks. You buy them for the performance.
That's their whole shtick. No one will care what it looks like if the
performance is outstanding. Wow. Uh
even the M.2 way down here on the board
is I would say barely accessible. I
think I could probably swap it out, but it wouldn't be easy. We do get one
expansion slot. We've got this one PCIe by one down here.
So, that's good. Otherwise, this GPU is taking up the whole thing. As for cable
management for our power connectors here, rather than come down to the power
supply like this, we're going to go up and over, and we're going to strap it in
really tight at the back to try to relieve some of the strain on our poor
PCIe slot here. So, bear with me. I wouldn't really recommend this, but I am
doing it. So, make of that what you will. Okay, let's see. Is it more level?
Actually, not bad. Well, bad, but not
unattractive. All that's left now is to fire it up.
Time for the big moment.
Oh, yeah. You can hear it a little. You can hear it a little. The all knock to a
PC does make a little bit of noise, but give it a second. I suspect that's just
the GPU ramping up. Oh, it's the power
supply. Wow. Is that ever quiet?
That is amazing. My mic is right here. I
am literally whispering right now.
And I'm inside this computer.
Man, you can feel the suck, too. Not that it sucks, it just airflow. While we
apply our memory overclock profile, I can share with you some fun things about
our peripherals. This may be RGB up the butt, but what's that? Brown switches
from GaDon. And well, this is more just
story time than anything else. This was the one gaming mouse we could find with
a fan in it. We really wanted to put a knock to a fan in there, but they don't
make one that small. So, it is now the loudest part of this build. Oh, wow.
What is this? Windows 95? What is happening? Allow me to just paint.
finish up my desktop wallpaper here. We're obviously going to have to get in
game for a while, but guys, I've got the panel closed.
This is so quiet.
Wow, our GPU is at 330 watts, running at
64°, and I can barely hear the bloody thing.
That is wild. How's our CPU doing? Oh, I
don't know. Maybe 67 degrees while drawing. Okay, that's only 62 watts. I
guess that fan just hasn't even ramped up. I swear I can hear a computer over
on the ShortCircuit set better than I can hear this one. It is so quiet. This
is in game now. This is legitimately in game. The one thing the PC can't cool
though is me. Thankfully though, I have this.
See if we can do a little better here.
This is an actual match. Yeah. I mean, you got to test it in the real
world, Brandon. I don't know why the FPS counter is not working. That's extremely
frustrating. Pretty quiet, eh? This fan at the back is got some toast, though.
It's hot. Is it hot in there? Oh, here. Let me help you with that. That one's
pretty quiet, too. Uh, no. This one's pretty loud. Just Yeah, this is not an
actual Noctua product. Um, and it's not
very quiet. The rig though is the only awkward part of the conversation is the
price. We've got somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 worth of fans in
here. Well outside the budget of most people when it comes to configuring a
gaming rig. But hey, you can't fault the performance or in my humble opinion, the
look, cuz this may be one of the most
ironically gorgeous builds we've ever done. If you guys enjoyed this video,
maybe you'll enjoy the closer look we took at the ASUS X Noctua GPU. It turns
out that the performance they've squeezed out of this thing and the
silence is not just as simple as slapping big fans on any old cooler.