The Card
MSI's card follows the visual theme that was introduced with their other GeForce 20 cards in recent months. The two fans are extra-large and cover most of the surface area on the card. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate. Dimensions of the card are 25x13 cm.
Installation requires three slots in your system.
Display connectivity options include one HDMI 2.0 and three DisplayPort 1.4 ports. Compared to the Founders Edition, the USB-C connector has been removed, probably to reduce cost.
NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined, this enables support for 8K@30Hz with a single cable, or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.
At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced that all their graphics cards will now support VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync). While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified with G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel, no matter whether the monitor is certified or not.
The board uses a single 8-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 225 watts of power draw.
The GeForce RTX 2060 does not support SLI.
Disassembly
MSI's cooler uses four heatpipes.
Once the main heatsink is removed, two black metal baseplates become visible, which provide cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.
The backplate is made out of metal and provides protection against damage during handling and installation.
On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.