Noctua cooler on upcoming Asus Strix graphics cards? Likely to happen
We have exclusively come across an information leak, which indicates that some of the upcoming ROG Strix graphics cards will have a cooler from Noctua. The headline could easily have a tabloid undertone “we’re first to know!”, but on the contrary, we will approach this thing with humility. There is little information and it is rather about clues. But it seems that the question at the moment is not IF, but WHEN.
At the very beginning of the article, it is important to point out that its content will be carried in a speculative spirit. The probability that some of the ROG graphics cards will be equipped with a Noctua cooler is quite high, but at the moment there is a lot of ambiguity about this topic and nothing is certain. Not even if that really happens.
However, the claim that Noctua and Asus are involved in this topic certainly is extremely likely. We got it from a relatively trustworthy source, or rather, from a source very close to one of the companies.
Reportedly, there is already a pre-final sample, of which unfortunately we do not even have any renders. We tried to get some details from both companies (Noctua and Asus), but for understandable reasons they both keep everything secret, but do not deny it. Although we did not get a direct answer, the reaction from a person who 100% knows how things are, is essentially confirmatory. Judge for yourselves from the short communication below. But in order to maintain good relations and out of elementary decency, we cannot reveal who we communicated with internally.
There are, of course, more than enough questions. Basically, we don’t even know which Asus graphics cards the Noctua cooler should appear on (but it will probably be on the more expensive ones and the Strix series makes sense here) or if current GPUs are the target, or it will apply to some not yet released ones (maybe on RTX 3000 Super?). But this cooler will probably not be waiting for the next generations of graphics cards, and we expect that it will appear on some cards, perhaps as part of a more luxurious “special edition”, this year. And maybe it will also be on some cards with a GPU that will run at higher frequency than the “regular” ones. This is how Asus’s marketing had been thinking a few times before and we don’t even have to go far for a demonstration (allegedly, the PixArt PAW3335 sensor in the ROG Keris mouse should also be more accurate than in other mice).
The main thing that interests us and probably you too is what that cooler will look like. We can only speculate about it for now. Asus also cooperates with Noctua on AIO ROG Ryujin (II) liquid coolers which use NF-A12x25 PWM fans will be used. At the moment, this may seem unrealistic just because of their “brown-beige” color, which would not match the rest. Of course, there is also the possibility that the entire graphics card would be in the traditional color theme of Noctua, but it would probably be a marketing suicide, because most users (and probably especially from the ranks of players) will probably be discouraged by this visual appearance rather than amazed.
But a more likely scenario will be that Noctua from sterrox will still be black, although it does not currently offer such a variant. However, when you look at the current company roadmap, brown-beige NF-A12x25 PWM fans should be complemented by black variants in Q4. It’s a little strange that Asus didn’t use its Strix XF 120 fans, which have top-notch specifications and are at the price level of Noctua fans, but maybe it’s a bit also due to optimizations for the heatsink. Noctua seems to be working on this as well, and yet it knows its fans better and thus can work more efficiently on the heatsink design.
Only a few chosen people, who are said to have seen the prototype of the cooler, which allegedly already exists, also know what the heatsink of this cooler will look like. However, due to the 25 mm fan thickness, the card can be expected to grow vertically and block perhaps four even PCI Express slots. We will see. In the end, it may happen that for some reason no Asus graphics cards with Noctua cooler will even be released. But it’s closer to reality that sooner or later these graphics cards will be presented or at least announced by Noctua or Asus (but more likely by Asus).