Introduction

We have with us the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO graphics card, priced at an attractive $299, just $20 from the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and AMD's new Radeon RX 5600 XT. In its CES 2020 reveal, AMD claimed that the RX 5600 XT is significantly faster than the GTX 1660 Ti, which would mean NVIDIA is no longer king of the $200–$300 segment. Any price cuts to the GTX 1660 Ti would have a cascading effect on pricing of the GTX 1660 Super and GTX 1660. NVIDIA had to do something. It tapped into some very clever engineering choices it made during the development of the "Turing" family of GPUs, which enabled the creation of the first sub-$300 RTX 2060. Part of the equation is the bet that people will willingly pay the extra $20 over the RX 5600 XT and buy the RTX 2060 instead, for future-proofing with ray-tracing.

The GeForce RTX 2060 is an interesting SKU. It's capable of 1440p gaming, but also has RTX real-time ray-tracing hardware, and is designed for RTX AAA gameplay at 1080p. For e-Sports titles that lack ray-tracing, it enables high frame-rates at 1080p, touching 100 FPS or more. With e-Sports, frame-rate is king, hence the rush for higher refresh-rates on gaming monitors these days. The RTX 2060 launched at $349 originally and and largely stuck to it because NVIDIA counted on RTX to make up for its 5% performance deficit to the $349 Radeon RX 5700. There's no such fig-leaf for the GTX 16-series, and if AMD manages to beat the GTX 1660 Ti at $279, NVIDIA is left with little choice but to lower prices on its RTX 2060, which is exactly what the RTX 2060 KO from EVGA is. The "KO" brand extension belongs to EVGA. Marketing materials of the card mention something along the lines of this card "knocking out any challenger," an unsubtle reference to the RX 5600 XT.



The EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO is made possible because of the way NVIDIA engineered three of its key "Turing" family GPUs, the TU104, TU106, and TU116. The three feature very different die-sizes, but the size of their fiberglass substrate (package) is the same. This is because NVIDIA decided to give them a common pin-map. This enables graphics card designers to share PCB designs among the three GPUs, reducing R&D costs, all while NVIDIA gets to better harvest its GPU dies. The EVGA KO in this review is one of the first RTX 2060 (non-Super) cards to be based on a larger "TU104" silicon, while the PCB design of this card is identical to that of EVGA's GTX 1660 Ti Ultra graphics cards. See what we mean? NVIDIA created an RTX 2060 out of a TU104 for EVGA by enabling 30 out of 48 streaming multiprocessors. Most RTX 2060 cards are TU106-based (30 out of 36 SMs enabled). The RTX 2060 KO from EVGA has the exact same specs as the RTX 2060, and you neither miss out on nor gain any features from the card being TU104-based.

The EVGA RTX 2060 KO features a compact dual-fan cooling solution and pulls power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. It sticks to NVIDIA-reference clock speeds of 1680 MHz GPU Boost and 14 Gbps memory (GDDR6-effective). However, EVGA also has a factory-overclocked variant of this card priced at $319 in the KO Ultra. The RTX 2060 offers 1,920 CUDA cores, 30 RT cores, and 240 tensor cores. Other key GPU specs include 120 TMUs and 48 ROPs. The card offers 6 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory bus, with 336 GB/s of bandwidth on tap. In this review, we take the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO for a spin so see how the new price affects the value proposition, and whether the card being TU104-based has any bearing on the power or thermals.