Fan Favorite Noctua Wants To Collab On An RTX 5090 But There's A Major Hurdle
Noctua certainly has its share of fans, and we don't just mean the kind that spin and push air around. We're talking about admirers and devoted followers. If you count yourself among them, you might be wondering if Noctua will ever collaborate with ASUS on a custom GeForce RTX 5090 like it recently did with the GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua OC Edition. The good news is, Noctua would "love to do a 5090."
Jakob Dellinger at Noctua relayed the sentiment in an interview with KitGuru, telling the outlet that NVIDIA's flagship GPU would be a "perfect fit" for a Noctua Edition model. However, the bad news here is that no such plans are imminent, though not from lack of interest by Noctua, ASUS, or either company's fans. Instead, it has to do with logistics.
According to Dellinger, the hurdle is GB202 chip supply. He told the outlet that there just are not enough GeForce RTX 5090 chips "at the moment" to proceed with collaboration, no matter how much the pairing makes sense.
That's a shame, though not surprising. Yes, it's pretty easy to find a GeForce RTX 5090 in stock these days, but pinpointing one at NVIDIA's baseline $1,999 MSRP is like finding a needle in a mile high haystack. The reason? A combination of market conditions (read: tariffs), greed by NVIDIA's add-in board partners and retailers, and prioritizing high-margin AI chip manufacturing over consumer GPUs.
NVIDIA's most recent earnings report (posted in May) revealed that the data center accounted for more than $39 billion in quarterly revenue, compared to $3.63 billion from its gaming products. Sure, $3.63 billion isn't exactly chump change...unless it's being compared to $39 billion.
Be that as it may, it's still possible that we'll see a GeForce RTX 5090 Noctua OC Edition at some point. If so, it will undoubtedly feature a similar brown aesthetic as the RTX 5090 collaboration. However, Dellinger told KitGuru that a 5090 variant would likely introduce some changes to the internal design, and specifically a revised heatsiink with a similar vapor chamber design as ASUS ROG's Astral GeForce RTX 5090.
To be clear, nothing is in motion right now. Clearly, however, Noctua has at least considered the possibility, and we'd be willing to bet that ASUS would be game as well.
