Noctua’s RTX 5080 came as a pleasant surprise at its official launch. For this card, Noctua didn’t just graft three NF-A12x25 G2 fans onto an Asus PCB, as these fans blow over a custom heatsink featuring no less than eleven heat pipes. But why stop at the 5080? Noctua has just confirmed that they’d like to release an RTX 5090 Noctua Edition, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon. The brand explains that the main stumbling block is the availability of the GB202 chips used by the RTX 5090. Highly coveted by professional boards and AI, their supply remains problematic, as Jakob Dellinger, Head of Public Relations and Product Management at Noctua, points out.
As you can see, the main issue is chip allocation. In an ideal world, Nvidia could simply increase the volume of GB202 chips allocated to the consumer market. However, Nvidia devotes the vast majority of its production volumes to artificial intelligence and data center solutions, such as the Blackwell RTX Pro 6000, which are sold at much higher prices.
An RTX 5090 Noctua Edition is conceivable…but it’s going to be a bit tricky!
However, this hasn’t stopped Noctua from cogitating, and Dellinger has shared some details on what an RTX 5090 Noctua Edition might look like, making it clear that these elements remain purely hypothetical. In the case of a 5090, Noctua would focus on adjustments to the cooling system, in comparison with the RTX 5080 model. Thus, the company could adopt a steam chamber design comparable to that of the ASUS RTX 5090 Astral, where the top of the chamber would be machined to secure the heat pipes without deforming them. Naturally, such an approach would have budgetary implications, while potentially providing the increased thermal efficiency required to dissipate heat from a high-power PCB. Finally, the transition to 8mm heat pipes (as opposed to the configuration of 4 x 6mm and 7 x 8mm heat pipes on the Noctua edition of the 5080) was also discussed. All these details confirm one thing: the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition costs an arm and a leg, while the 5090 version will cost you both arms + a kidney 😉