First, I'd like to thank Galax for providing this review sample—it has been over ten years since our last review of one of their products, and I really appreciate getting the chance to look at their RTX 2060 Super EX. Galax has overclocked their card to a rated boost of 1695 MHz, which is 45 MHz higher than the Founders Edition and results in a 4% performance improvement over the FE, bringing the card ever so closer to the Radeon 5700 XT—the difference is only 2% now, and the RTX 2060S EX matches the original RTX 2070. AMD's fastest, the Radeon VII, is another 10% faster. Compared to the non-Super RTX 2060, the performance uplift is an impressive 18%, and the RTX 2070 Super is 13% faster. With those performance numbers, we can easily recommend the card for gaming at 1440p.

While it does not look as bulky as the flagship cards from other GPU vendors, Galax actually put a very good cooler on their card. The triple-slot, dual-fan design hits lower temperatures than any RTX 2060 Super we have tested so far by a pretty big margin. Gaming temperature ends up fairly cool with just 64°C, which is 12°C better than the Founders Edition. Part of the improvement comes from the fan speeds, which I think are a little bit faster than necessary. This results in noise levels that are slightly increased over the Founders Edition. With Galax's main market being Asian countries, I can sympathize with that fan curve as I keep hearing that many customers in those markets focus on temperatures, with noise levels being secondary. What we have to praise Galax for is including the highly popular idle-fan-stop feature on the EX, which completely shuts off the card's fans during idle, desktop work, and light gaming.

Gaming power consumption is very similar 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, Galax's card uses the same 175 W power limit as the Founders Edition. An increase here to unlock additional FPS would have been nice as the card would then be able to boost higher for longer, and there is plenty of thermal headroom to do so.

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 1998 MHz on average and 7.2% performance gained, the results are decent and comparable to other RTX 2060 Super cards. It would have been nice to see a memory overclock out of the box because the chips can definitely take it as our manual overclocking results show.

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 about the RTX 2060's RTX capabilities being a bit slow for all the eye candy, but NVIDIA has stated publicly that they will ensure even weaker RTX cards will produce a decent raytracing experience.

Priced at $400, the Galax RTX 2060 Super EX matches NVIDIA Founders Edition pricing, which is the card's biggest selling point. Unless you absolutely must have the sexy looks of the FE, you should definitely consider the Galax EX. It comes with an overclock out of the box that yields easy extra performance and has similar overclocking potential as other, more expensive custom designs. The cooler is greatly improved, featuring idle fan stop and much better temperatures. The only drawback is that noise is not as low as on competing RTX 2060 Super cards, but that can easily be fixed with a custom fan curve—the cooler has plenty of thermal headroom to do that. At $400, the Galax Super EX is strong competition to AMD's new Radeon RX 5700 XT, which is priced identically, but runs much hotter and noisier and is plagued by early driver issues. It will still have an effect on pricing for the RTX 2060 Super in the long run, I'm sure. 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.