Earlier this year, Noctua lent its ultra-quiet fan technology to Nvidia’s RTX 50 series with custom RTX 5060 Ti, 5070, and 5070 Ti GPUs. More recently, the brand announced a collaboration with ASUS to release the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition card, with “impressively low noise levels” and the iconic Noctua design.

You may notice that they haven’t got around to producing something similar for the current flagship Nvidia GPU, the RTX 5090. It seems there’s a good reason for that. In response to a recent review, Noctua has said that it would “love” to make a 5090 version of the GPU, but chip supply for the flagship is too scarce “at the moment”.

RTX 5090 supply is too low to make a Noctua Edition

The news comes from KitGuru, which recently reviewed the RTX 5080 Noctua Edition graphics card. Rightfully so, the publication wondered why the cooling brand didn’t go all-out on an RTX 5090 model; Noctua promptly provided them with a response. KitGuru got a response from Jakob Dellinger, Noctua PR and Product Management, to say that the brand would “love to do a 5090” and “completely agree that this would be a perfect fit” – but supplies are holding them back.

It doesn’t rule out the possibility entirely, but it seems unlikely. Allocation for RTX 5090 chips is the biggest problem. Nvidia isn’t making enough GB202 dies to accommodate such a project, or rather, many of them are being allocated to the more profitable AI and datacenter space. Consumers have long battled with stock shortages and price inflation, though we’re recently starting to see the 5090 actually available for MSRP.

Jakob Dellinger suggested (speculatively) that Noctua would focus on changing the heatsink compared to the existing 5080 model to create a Noctua RTX 5090, while using a similar vapor chamber design to the ASUS RTX 5090 Astral; we’ve reviewed the overclocked BTF version of this GPU if you want to learn more about it. All 8mm heatpipes were also suggested, rather than the 4x 6mm and 7x 8mm pipes on the 5080 Noctua model.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

ROG Astral RTX 5090 BTF OC

4.5 /5

Editor’s Rating

How We Review

Specifications

• GPU: GB202
• CUDA cores: 21,760
• VRAM: 32GB GDDR7
• Memory bus width: 512-bit
• Base clock speed: 2,010MHz
• Boost clock speed: 2,610MHz

• Shop on Amazon
• Shop on Overclockers

Regardless, this is all speculation for now, so we’ll have to wait and see if this becomes a reality in the future.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.