EVGA's GeForce RTX 2070 Super KO has been released fairly late in the "Turing" lifecycle, but it's still an important release because it is ready for a price-war with AMD—similar to what EVGA did with the RTX 2060 KO. While the RTX 2060 KO used a different GPU (TU104 vs. TU106), the RTX 2070 Super KO has no such surprises. It simply is a highly cost-optimized design; EVGA removed the USB-C port that really didn't take off, but added substantial production cost and complicated power budgeting, for example. The VRM configuration has also been modified a bit, now using a 7-phase design and a more cost-efficient controller for memory voltage.

EVGA doesn't include a factory overclock with their RTX 2070 Super KO. In all our testing, the card matches the RTX 2070 Super Founder Edition almost exactly. This makes the RTX 2070 Super KO 8% faster than the Radeon RX 5700 XT and 3% faster than AMD's Radeon VII flagship. Compared to Pascal, the KO roughly matches the GTX 1080 Ti. The GeForce RTX 2070 is 12% slower, and the RTX 2080 pushes out 7% more FPS. The EVGA RTX 2070 Super KO is great for 1440p 60 FPS gaming. It even reaches more than 90 FPS in many titles of our test suite and is good for 4K gaming if you're willing to turn down some graphics settings in the most demanding games.

EVGA's thermal solution is quite decent, especially considering it's a dual-slot design. Temperatures are good with 70°C, which is roughly in the middle of the RTX 2070 Super cards we've tested so far. Unfortunately, noise levels are higher than expected. It seems EVGA wanted to focus more on reducing temperatures than keeping acoustics down. With 38 dBA, the card will be well audible when gaming—it won't be "noisy," but nor will it be far from it. Competing RTX 2070 Super cards do much better here. We've tested nine models which are all quieter. I reached out to EVGA, and they confirmed that these are the expected temperature and noise levels for this card. Manual fan control is possible in EVGA's Precision software, so you can always quieten down the fan manually. Unlike some other RTX 2070 Super cards, particularly NVIDIA Founder's Edition, EVGA's KO features idle fan stop, which turns off the fans completely during idle, productivity, Internet browsing, and light gaming. I can understand why EVGA doesn't include a backplate with their card, but I think a $500 graphics card deserves a backplate, even if it's just a plastic one.

Just like all other NVIDIA Turing cards, the RTX 2070 Super KO is highly energy efficient, even though it's doing slightly worse than other RTX 2070 Super cards. EVGA made changes to the VRM circuitry and slightly increased the GPU voltage, which apparently increased power draw somewhat. The increase is just a few percent, so it won't make a big difference for day-to-day usage. What I like is that they increased the card's power limit, which will let the card boost higher for longer and should be useful for overclocking. Surprisingly, the manual adjustment power limit has been reduced by 10 W compared to the Founders Edition, maybe because the KO is a 7-phase design, whereas the FE uses eight power phases. Overclocking still worked well as we gained 10% in real-life performance.

On the topic of ray tracing, I'm sure you've already made up your mind on whether it's something you're interested in or not, but I don't doubt for a second that NVIDIA is pushing the technology very hard with their excellent developer relations, and it looks like the adoption rate is improving. Next-gen consoles and AMD's RDNA 2 architecture will feature some sort of ray tracing technology, too. I'd say it's not a big deal for the next months, but once hardware platform support is widely established and no hardware vendor opposes ray tracing, game developers will certainly start adding it to their titles. So if future-proofing for many years is important for you, this could be a factor.

With a price of $499, the RTX 2070 Super KO is the most affordable RTX 2070 Super card available—no price increase over MSRP. That makes the EVGA KO an excellent choice for 1440p gaming at highest details. Still, there are alternatives at that same price point, like the Gigabyte RTX 2070 Super WindForce that uses a triple-slot, triple-fan cooler and has a factory overclock and backplate. It looks to me like the RTX 2070 Super KO was engineered to be ready for sub-$500 pricing, which will happen as soon as NVIDIA allows it. If you are willing to live with lower performance and no real-time hardware ray tracing, the Radeon RX 5700 XT could be an alternative as it is substantially cheaper, starting at $380. We've introduced a new test bench with this review—frametime measurements were added, specifically to compare the RTX 2070 Super with the RX 5700 XT. The numbers show no significant difference in minimum FPS and stutter between both cards. While the AMD card clearly has lower FPS, the differences are not as big as the $120 price difference would suggest, and results depend on the game selection, too.