ASUS ROG RTX 5080 Astral Review
Conclusion
Conclusion
There is a phrase in writing called “burying the lede”. It’s to do with not mentioning the most important thing right at the start. We’ve always ignored that idea. Partly because we understand you’re intelligent people and so you’ll know what we’re getting at when we get there, and partly because we don’t consider insane word counts as a flex. Your time is valuable. Ours is too.
Anyway, whenever we’re about to write a conclusion we have a quick chat about what we feel is the key thing. For some hardware it’s the aesthetics. Or the performance. With the ASUS ROG RTX 5080 Astral we’ve got two possible directions to take. Thus we’re less burying the lede than we are flannelling about unimportant things until we work out which is our main take away.
The MSRP cards – the Nvidia and Zotac – were both very capable performers. We knew going in that the RTX 5080 had a price floor much lower than the RTX 4080 did when it was first launched. The response to the Ada Lovelace pricing was so vitriolic Nvidia made sure the new Blackwell cards were below four figures. We even mentioned in our wrap-up yesterday that the non-MSRP cards had to perform brilliantly to justify any price increase. Like all Republic of Gamers hardware there is no doubt the RTX 5080 Astral has performance to burn. It’s the fastest clock speed card of the four we’ve tested so far, and the results generally bore that out.
The Key Thing
Then again it should be. It’s a £1300 card. So much more than MSRP cards that you could buy the Nvidia FE and an Intel Core i7-14700K for the same price as this. But that’s not the main thing. It also draws 14.9% more power than that aforementioned Nvidia RTX 5080 FE card. So we’d damn well expect it to perform better. That’s not the main thing either. Nope. The main thing is the noise. You know the famous THX logo at the beginning of films? The one that has us all scrambling for the remote. That’s nothing compared to the noise the extra fan on the ASUS Astral puts out. If we ended up with a card that ran at 60°C then there might, just, be an argument for it.
But no. Both the MSRP Zotac Solid, and significantly cheap Palit card are cooler than this. As Huey Lewis famously said to Marty McFly, you’re just too damn loud.
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