ASUS ROG RTX 5080 Astral Review
Up Close
Up Close
It isn’t just the expected name that caught us off guard. Old ASUS ROG boxes were red with black accents and silver text. Then a few years ago it all went black with red accents and silver text. The ROG Astral dispenses with the red entirely. Maybe it’s Nvidia not wanting the Radeon association? Curious either way.
From the front you would be forgiven for thinking the RTX 5080 Astral has nothing particularly new. It does though. The three fans you can see here, even with the gorgeous chrome ring, are just the beginning.
We’re famously big fans of a good cutout. It’s so obviously helpful to your cooling. ASUS clearly agree and not only supply the Astral with a big cutout, but a fan too. Anyone who has had push/pull fans will understand. Is this extra fan going to make the Astral loud, or does the cooler temperature make for slower, quieter fans? Only one way to find out.
If the Astral was any thicker it could open up a Fansly. Like the Zotac and Palit we’ve also covered in the last 24 hours, the ROG Astral is a monster. If you’re particularly keen of eyesight you’ll be able to spot the light bar above the ROG logo. Rather than dazzle you, the Astral takes the ambient approach. A light that softly illuminates. Softly softly.
ASUS have always been good at leveraging hardware for other purposes. We’ve seen them have graphics cards that control lighting. The Astral can control your fan speeds, drawing extra cold air in if necessary.
ASUS have spent a huge amount of design effort on the GPU area itself. There is a vapour chamber that moves heat swiftly to the thick heatpipes you can see here. Beneath that we have a GPU brace to ensure there is no warping, a phase change thermal pad that melts to fit what tiny gaps there are thanks to the MaxContact design, and the insanity of the huge heatsink. It’s a lot to take in. Certainly on paper this should be the coolest card we’ve tested.
As we mentioned in our introduction, the Astral boasts an extra HDMI over the regular Blackwell cards. Perfect if you’ve a plethora of panels.
