Today, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060 Super is available on store shelves and reviews of the AIC partner cards are allowed. All of NVIDIA's board partners have released Super models, and this review covers the EVGA RTX 2060 Super SC Ultra—we have a total of six reviews today covering other vendors, and the RTX 2070 Super, too.

EVGA has overclocked their RTX 2060 Super SC Ultra to a rated boost of 1680 MHz, which is only 30 MHz higher than the Founders Edition and results in a 3% performance improvement over the FE, bringing the card even closer to the Radeon 5700 XT—the difference is only another 3% now, and the SC Ultra almost matches the original RTX 2070, too. AMD's fastest, the Radeon VII, is 11% faster. Compared to the non-Super RTX 2060, the performance uplift is a solid 14%, and the RTX 2070 Super is 15% faster. With those performance numbers, we can easily recommend the card for gaming at 1440p.

The thermal solution of EVGA's card is more capable than the NVIDIA Founders Edition cooler, reducing temperatures by 9°C. Unfortunately, fan noise remains unchanged. While definitely quiet, I wish EVGA had used some of those temperature gains to quieten down the fan some more, adding to the competitiveness against the Founders Edition. What we have to praise EVGA for including the highly popular idle-fan stop feature on the SC Ultra, which completely shuts off the card's fans during idle, desktop work, and light gaming.

Gaming power consumption is pretty much identical to that of the Founders Edition. With only 200 W, it is efficient enough to work with nearly all power supplies, even older models. Out of the box, EVGA's card uses the same 175 W power limit as the Founders Edition; an increase here would have been nice for additional FPS because the card would be able to boost higher for longer. Our initial review sample had the manual adjustment power limit set to 200 W (15 W below the Founders Edition), EVGA has since released an updated BIOS with a 215 W power limit.

Overclocking our card worked well even though it is complicated a bit by the power limiter messing with your overclock. With a maximum clock of 1961 MHz on average and 6.4% performance gained, the results are decent. Surprisingly, both the GPU and memory overclock ended up a bit lower than on other RTX 2060 Super cards. EVGA could have gained some easy extra performance by overclocking the memory out of the box, too—nothing you can't quickly do yourself, though.

Unlike AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT, the NVIDIA RTX Super lineup comes with support for raytracing hardware acceleration. While that's not the most important feature to have right now, it looks like game developers are picking up on it, and many upcoming titles have been announced to feature raytracing, so the future might be bright for RTX. I am slightly concerned that the RTX 2060's RTX capabilities might be a bit slow for all the eye candy, but NVIDIA has stated publicly that they will ensure even weaker RTX cards will provide a decent raytracing experience.

Priced at $400, EVGA isn't asking for a premium over the NVIDIA Founders Edition. That's great, because it essentially declares the RTX 2060 Super SC Ultra an FE alternative that runs at lower temperatures and adds idle fan stop. Thanks to the overclock out of the box, you also get some additional performance over the Founders Edition; I'd say that makes it a no brainer unless you really crave the looks of NVIDIA's reference board. AMD recently released the Radeon RX 5700 XT at $400, too, which offers slightly better performance, but runs much hotter and noisier and is plagued by early driver issues. In order to sweeten the deal, NVIDIA includes a two-game bundle with all RTX Super cards consisting of Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Control. Both titles come with support for NVIDIA RTX raytracing to show off the capabilities of their new technology.