The EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 Black is the first GeForce 20 Series card we review that's priced at NVIDIA MSRP. Looks like everybody but EVGA is scared to send in their "cheap" cards for review. MSRP pricing means that the card is built using the TU106 GPU and not TU106-A (which is reserved for the overclocked variants, including the Founders Edition). Due to the same limitation, EVGA isn't allowed to overclock their card out of the box—the card must run at NVIDIA reference clocks of 1410 MHz base and 1750 MHz Boost. Compared to the Founders Edition, that's a 90 MHz Boost disadvantage.

When averaged over our benchmarks, the EVGA RTX 2070 Black is just 2% slower than the RTX 2070 Founders Edition, which is not a lot, almost negligible. Compared to the GTX 1080, the card is 12% faster, and 12% slower than GTX 1080 Ti—it sits right between those cards. NVIDIA flagship cards, the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, are 22% and 49% faster respectively. AMD's fastest, the Vega 64, is conclusively beat by the RTX 2070 Black, which is 16% faster, but similarly priced, with much better power, heat, and noise. Overall, the RTX 2070 is an excellent choice for maximum details 1440p gaming, able to give you at least 60 FPS in all recent titles. High-FPS 1080p gaming is possible, too, but the card won't reach 144 FPS in all titles at that resolution unless you dial down some settings.

Visually, the EVGA GeForce 20 cards introduce a new style that's dominated by transparent plastic and EVGA logo dimples on the fan blades. To be honest, I'm not a big fan of that look, but tastes differ. EVGA's dual-slot, dual-fan cooler does a great job keeping the card cool with temperatures of only 64°C during gaming. Gaming noise levels are pretty much identical to the RTX 2070 Founders Edition, which is good, but could be better in my opinion. Personally, I would have sacrificed a few degrees in temperature for lower noise levels as less noise is a better selling point, especially in this price segment where the usual competitors use cheap blower-style fans to reach the MSRP price point. Idle fan noise is perfect since the card includes the popular idle-fan-stop feature, which shuts off the fans completely when the card is lightly loaded during desktop work, Internet browsing, and media playback.

Like all other GeForce 20 cards, the EVGA RTX 2070 Black is held by Turing's power limits. While previous generations were limited by GPU temperatures, cards will now sit in their power limit all the time during gaming, which means the highest boost clocks are never reached during regular gameplay. Don't get me wrong, all cards boost far higher than their "rated" boost. For example, the EVGA RTX 2070 Black is rated for 1620 MHz, but will actually run 1798 MHz on average, which is only 64 MHz lower than what we measured on the Founders Edition.

Manual overclocking has once more become more complicated with this generation. Since the cards are always running in the power limiter, you can no longer just dial in stable clocks for the highest boost state to find the maximum overclock. The biggest issue is that you can't just reach that state reliably, so your testing is limited to whatever frequency your test load is running at. Nevertheless, we managed to pull through and achieved a good overclock on our RTX 2070 that translated into 11% additional performance. A lot of people are concerned that the TU106 GPUs are binned to be worse overclockers, but our data so far doesn't support that. Both RTX 2070s we tested reached very similar clocks—the differences are not big enough to buy a TU106-A GPU variant at premium pricing.

Pricing is actually what it's all about for EVGA's RTX 2070 Black. At just $500, the card is $100 cheaper than the Founders Edition and most competing custom designs; that's 20%. There's no way any of the $600 RTX 2070s can give you 20% "better", no matter if looking at performance, power efficiency, noise, or temperatures. Of course, looks are subjective, and I'm sure many people will just buy the Founders Edition because it looks so amazing. Other people will want the absolutely lowest fan noise, making only large triple-slot cards a viable choice. Then there are the very few who want to eke every last MHz out of the card with overclocking, and are willing to pay a premium for that even though it barely makes one frame per second difference. For the vast majority of the market, the EVGA RTX 2070 Black is the right choice, though. GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, Vega 56, Vega 64—all have worse price/performance than the EVGA card even though buying used could be an option, especially if you don't believe NVIDIA RTX and DLSS will materialize. We have no doubts that NVIDIA can pull it off, and there isn't much of an "RTX tax" at the $499 price point anyway.