Introduction

Just last week, NVIDIA surprised AMD with its GeForce RTX Super series graphics cards that are designed to preempt the Radeon RX 5700-series "Navi" graphics cards. Since then, AMD has launched their Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, which we thoroughly reviewed. The Green team is now letting loose a large selection of custom-design graphics RTX Super boards from its add-in-card (AIC) partners, many of which we are reviewing today. NVIDIA designed the RTX 2060 Super to beat the RX 5700 without stepping on the RTX 2070's toes, while the RTX 2070 Super uses the larger 13.6 billion-transistor "TU104" silicon to compete with the RX 5700 XT. The two will be joined by the RTX 2080 Super on the 23rd of July.



NVIDIA carved the original RTX 2060 out of the "TU106" silicon by disabling a quarter of its memory subsystem and enabling just 1,920 out of the 2,304 CUDA cores available on the silicon. The original RTX 2070 maxes out this chip. The new RTX 2060 Super has the full 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus with which it talks to 8 GB of memory. NVIDIA also upped the CUDA core count to 2,176, just a TPC short of the RTX 2070. The RTX 2070 Super is carved out of the larger "TU104" silicon by enabling 2,560 out of the chip's 3,072 CUDA cores, while leaving its memory subsystem untouched.

During our reviews of the original RTX 2060, we noticed that almost all PCBs had pads for 8 memory chips, which leads us to believe that the RTX 2060 Super was part of NVIDIA's plans all along. It wouldn't surprise us to find that most custom-design RTX 2060 Super graphics cards are based on the existing RTX 2060 PCBs with all the memory pads populated, and only the very premium overclocked models use the larger PCB meant for the RTX 2070. With their custom-design boards, NVIDIA allows its partners to innovate not just with cooling, but also giving their cards a small degree of factory overclocking and increases to the board power limit.

In this review, we have with us the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 Super SC Ultra. The brand extension is not to be confused with EVGA's SSC (super-super-clocked). You can tell the RTX 2060 Super from the original RTX 2060 by looking at the memory size. SC is the company's tier-2 factory-overclock level, and the card ships with a GPU Boost frequency of 1680 MHz. It appears to be using the same PCB as the original RTX 2060 XC series products, but with its vacant two memory pads populated and a little up-tuning on the VRM. EVGA is pricing the RTX 2060 Super SC Ultra at $400, which means it comes at the same price as the NVIDIA Founders Edition.

Our coverage of the RTX Super Series custom-design launch day includes the following content:
MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Super Gaming X | Palit GeForce RTX 2060 Super JetStream | EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 Super SC Ultra | EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 Super FTW3 Ultra | ASUS ROG Strix RTX 2070 Super OC | MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming X Trio