Introduction

NVIDIA today gave its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card lineup a mid-lifecycle update with the new "Super" RTX 20-series. It may not seem so, but the RTX 20-series graphics cards have been around for over 8 months, and AMD is finally giving the mid-segment some competition with its 7 nm PCIe Gen 4 Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" series with the company claiming competitive performance leads over the high-volume GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2070. NVIDIA decided to upscale the two SKUs at their price points with new models. We hence have the new GeForce RTX 2070 Super and GeForce RTX 2060 Super, which will be available starting on the 9th of July, priced at $399 and $499, respectively. The two will be joined by the high-end GeForce RTX 2080 Super later this month, on the 23rd.

The original RTX 2060 was carved out of the 12 nm "TU106" silicon by chopping off a quarter of its memory size/speed and enabling 1,920 out of the 2,304 CUDA cores physically present on the chip. The new RTX 2060 Super restores the memory subsystem to its full glory. The GPU now has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. At its rated speed of 14 Gbps, this works out to 448 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Interestingly, this is the same exact amount of memory and bandwidth as the $700 RTX 2080. NVIDIA enabled more CUDA cores present on the silicon. The CUDA core count is up at 2,176. The RT core count is proportionately increased to 34 from 30, and the Tensor core count is 272 from 240. NVIDIA also slightly pushed up the GPU clock speed, to 1470 MHz from 1365 MHz, although the GPU Boost frequency is trimmed to 1650 MHz from 1680 MHz.



NVIDIA is targeting the Radeon RX 5700 with the RTX 2060 Super, and unlike the RTX 2070 Super, it doesn't displace the original RTX 2060 from its price point of $349. Rather, it's priced at a $50 premium at $399. It's also $20 pricier than the $379 MSRP of the upcoming RX 5700, which will spice things up in the sub-$400 segment. The original RTX 2060 already demonstrated 1440p gaming credentials across most of our vast selection of games, and the RTX 2060 Super could only build on that. The extra 2 GB of memory will certainly help.


As we stated above, the RTX 2060 Super is carved out of the "TU106" silicon by disabling just one of the TPCs (two streaming multiprocessors), making it almost an RTX 2070 if you know how to overclock. This isn't the first time NVIDIA has done something of this nature. The GTX 1070 Ti is almost a GTX 1080. The resulting specifications are 2,176 CUDA cores, 136 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 34 RT cores, and 272 Tensor cores. The biggest change, though, is the memory: the full 256-bit bus width is enabled, and the GPU has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory at its disposal.

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation

The Card

Visually, the RTX 2060 Super looks identical to the RTX 2060 with the exception of the green "Super" badge on a mirror-reflective background. The backplate seems identical, too, as just another "Super" badge has been added. Dimensions of the card are 23.0 x 11.5 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two standard DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.0b, one DVI-D connector (no analog VGA support), and a VirtualLink connector, which is basically USB-C with DisplayPort routing and USB-PD, so a single cable can power, display, and take input from your VR HMD.

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 for G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel regardless of 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 Super does not support SLI.

Disassembly

Disassembling the card is identical to the RTX 2070 and RTX 2060—more difficult than ever. In order to get the PCB out, you have to remove the backplate first, remove all the screws on the backside of the card, and then carefully lift up the cooler. Now, you'll be stuck with the power connector sitting between the baseplate and the rest of the cooler. Near the front of the cooling assembly are two screws that have to be removed. Be very careful as it's super easy to strip those screws because they're made from a soft metal.

With the screws gone, the card will fall apart into four pieces: fan assembly, heatsink, black metal baseplate, and the PCB itself.

The next step requires you to remove the screws that hold the flat ribbon cable and power connector in place before carefully removing the flat ribbon cable glued to the baseplate.

Overall, this is the most complicated VGA card disassembly I've ever seen—be careful.


The fan assembly consists of just the two fans, which are made by AVC, and the shiny metal trim.


The heatsink combines copper baseplate and two fat heatpipes with a large black heatsink that dissipates the heat in the airflow of the fans.


The black metal baseplate provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. It also has a few thermal pads to help with VRM cooling.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt-modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use them in your articles or forum posts.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).