Introduction

NVIDIA earlier this month launched its most important GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card, the RTX 2060, along the sidelines of CES 2019. With a list price of $349, this card is designed for affordable 1440p gaming with all details cranked up, including real-time raytracing RTX features. The de facto reference-design RTX 2060 rendition, dubbed Founders Edition, was reviewed around a week ago. The RTX 2060 is a primarily partner-driven launch, which means there could be dozens of custom-design graphics card models from NVIDIA's various add-in card partners (AICs).

The RTX 2060 was rumored to come in half a dozen sub-variants based on memory size and type, although in the end, NVIDIA only launched the top-spec variant with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. Perhaps, NVIDIA is saving the other SKUs up for when its GTX 1060 inventories are sufficiently off the shelves and spring-summer sets in. NVIDIA carved the RTX 2060 out from the same silicon as the RTX 2070, the 12 nm Turing "TU106." This means you very much do get RT cores and Tensor cores, and NVIDIA wants you to enjoy real-time ray-traced gaming with this card, particularly with RTX enabled, and NVIDIA's ambitious new image-quality innovation, DLSS (deep-learning super-sampling).



The RTX 2060 is equipped with 1,920 CUDA cores, which is a huge step up from the GTX 1060 6 GB (1,280), spread across 30 out of 36 streaming multiprocessors on the "TU106." You hence get 30 RT cores and 240 tensor cores. NVIDIA narrowed the memory bus width of this chip down to 192-bit and equipped it with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps, resulting in 336 GB/s of memory bandwidth (roughly on par with that of a GTX 980 Ti).

MSI's GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming Z ticks all the feature checkboxes. It comes with the idle-fan-stop feature that's missing on the Founders Edition and provides some extra bling through its adjustable RGB lighting. The thermal solution has been beefed up as well—it's now triple slot with two fans. Out of the box, the card comes overclocked to a boost frequency of 1830 MHz, which is the highest of all the RTX 2060 cards announced so far.

According to MSI, their GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming Z will retail between $379 and $389, so we used $385 throughout this review for our calculations.