Monday, January 7th 2019
Hands On with a Pack of RTX 2060 Cards
NVIDIA late Sunday announced the GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card at $349. With performance rivaling the GTX 1070 Ti and RX Vega 56 on paper, and in some cases even the GTX 1080 and RX Vega 64, the RTX 2060 in its top-spec trim with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory, could go on to be NVIDIA's best-selling product from its "Turing" RTX 20-series. At the CES 2019 booth of NVIDIA, we went hands-on with a few of these cards, beginning NVIDIA's de-facto reference-design Founders Edition. This card indeed feels smaller and lighter than the RTX 2070 Founders Edition.
The Founders Edition still doesn't compromise on looks or build quality, and is bound to look slick in your case, provided you manage to find one in retail. The RTX 2060 launch will be dominated by NVIDIA's add-in card partners, who will dish out dozens of custom-design products. Although NVIDIA didn't announce them, there are still rumors of other variants of the RTX 2060 with lesser memory amounts, and GDDR5 memory. You get the full complement of display connectivity, including VirtualLink.
MSI showed off its RTX 2060 Ventus, an elegantly designed card that's positioned lower down its product-stack that's otherwise led by premium Gaming-Z series products. The Ventus borrows many design cues from the Founders Edition, and is perfect for RGB heathens who just need something to game with. Also lying around was an ASUS ROG Strix RTX 2060 O8G. This card is huge, and closely resembles the company's RTX 2070-based ROG Strix cards. A large dual fin-stack cooling solution lets ASUS dial up clock-speeds, while you get some ROG Strix exclusives, such as case fan headers.
EVGA went ahead and designed a triple-slot card based on the RTX 2060. This isn't an oversized card designed to compensate for its mid-range GPU; but rather a densely packed aluminium fin-stack cooler ventilated by a single fan, and is built along the same philosophy as the Ultra Silent series from the previous generation. ZOTAC and Inno3D each have compact board designs that have been built to a cost, and are expected to sell the most, due to aggressive pricing. These cards are guaranteed to fit in most cases, owing to a ~20 cm board length, nearly-standard height, and yet a dual-fan cooling solution.
Palit and Gainward each have a well-balanced board design that's neither too compact like ZOTAC, nor too beefy like the ASUS Strix. Both cards feature a dual-fan cooler, with an aluminium fin-stack heatsink, factory-overclock, and a ~23 cm board length. All these cards will debut on the 15th of January, however, NVIDIA's partners are expected to launch dozens more SKUs running up to Spring-Summer.
The Founders Edition still doesn't compromise on looks or build quality, and is bound to look slick in your case, provided you manage to find one in retail. The RTX 2060 launch will be dominated by NVIDIA's add-in card partners, who will dish out dozens of custom-design products. Although NVIDIA didn't announce them, there are still rumors of other variants of the RTX 2060 with lesser memory amounts, and GDDR5 memory. You get the full complement of display connectivity, including VirtualLink.
27 Comments on Hands On with a Pack of RTX 2060 Cards
Wizz ?
And If it gonna end that way - thus making RTX 3080 Ti cost like 3000$ and 3080 1500$, I wonder what they will do with consoles? Seems like next gen is going to hit 4K, seriously. And I can say current xonex and ps4pro output pretty neat picture, very close to pc high quality settings - so the whole situation is far more better than it was 5-10 years ago.
Simply put, before it was almost identical in terms price-perfomance quality, now, with 3x-6x difference, I doubt they will have customers left at all, exept of brain-dead pc enthusiast.
My last case, lots of room. Power port on the end (side) of the card would have been better. I'd just route the power cable through the holes in the case and click it right in. But with the power port being on top of my current card I had to fight with the cable to get it to at the right angle and then try to push the excess cable back down to keep unnecessary cabling out of the way. I make it sound worse than it was. I just would have been slightly more convenient to have the power port on the side of my GPU with my last tower, that's all I'm trying to say.
Just because the market isn't in a good shape right now doesn't mean it won't change. Its always about ups and downs. The key is buying at the right time, and now is not it.
www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/rtx-2060/