Today, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060 Super is available on store shelves and reviews of the AIC partner cards are allowed. All of NVIDIA's board partners have released Super models, and this review covers the MSI RTX 2060 Super Gaming X—we have a total of six reviews today covering other vendors, and the RTX 2070 Super, too.

MSI has overclocked their RTX 2060 Super Gaming X 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 Gaming X matches the original RTX 2070. AMD's fastest, the Radeon VII, is 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.

The thermal solution of MSI's card is more capable than the NVIDIA Founders Edition cooler, reducing temperatures by 9°C. Unfortunately, fan noise remains unchanged. While definitely quiet, I wish MSI had used some of those temperature gains to quieten down the fan some more, adding to the competitiveness against the Founders Edition. What we have to praise MSI for is including the highly popular idle-fan stop feature on the Gaming X, 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, MSI'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. The manual adjustment power limit is set to 185 W in the BIOS, which is lower than the 215 W of the Founders Edition—looks like a BIOS bug to me I'm sure MSI will fix in no time.

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 1996 MHz on average and 7.4% 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 that the RTX 2060's RTX capabilities might be 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 $415, the MSI RTX 2060 Super Gaming is just $15 more expensive than the NVIDIA Founders Edition, or 3.75%. You get 4% in extra performance out of the box, which on its own does justify the increase. On top of that, the cooler is a bit more powerful, comes with fan stop, and reduces temperatures quite a bit. AMD recently released the Radeon RX 5700 XT at $400, which offers similar performance, 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, 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.