Introduction

Just last week, NVIDIA surprised AMD with its GeForce RTX Super series graphics cards that are designed to preempt the Radeon RX 5700-series "Navi" graphics cards. Since then, AMD has launched their Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, which we thoroughly reviewed. The Green team is now letting loose a large selection of custom-design graphics RTX Super boards from its add-in-card (AIC) partners, many of which we are reviewing today. NVIDIA designed the RTX 2060 Super to beat the RX 5700 without stepping on the RTX 2070's toes, while the RTX 2070 Super uses the larger 13.6 billion-transistor "TU104" silicon to compete with the RX 5700 XT. The two will be joined by the RTX 2080 Super on the 23rd of July.



NVIDIA carved the original RTX 2060 out of the "TU106" silicon by disabling a quarter of its memory subsystem and enabling just 1,920 out of the 2,304 CUDA cores available on the silicon. The original RTX 2070 maxes out this chip. The new RTX 2060 Super has the full 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus with which it talks to 8 GB of memory. NVIDIA also upped the CUDA core count to 2,176, just a TPC short of the RTX 2070. The RTX 2070 Super is carved out of the larger "TU104" silicon by enabling 2,560 out of the chip's 3,072 CUDA cores, while leaving its memory subsystem untouched.

During our reviews of the original RTX 2060, we noticed that almost all PCBs had pads for 8 memory chips, which has us believe that the RTX 2060 Super was part of NVIDIA's plans all along. It wouldn't surprise us to find that most custom-design RTX 2060 Super graphics cards are based on the existing RTX 2060 PCBs with all memory pads populated, and only the very premium overclocked models use the larger PCB meant for the RTX 2070. With their custom-design boards, NVIDIA allows its partners to innovate not just with cooling, but also giving their cards a small degree of factory overclocking and increases to the board power limit.

In this review, we take a look at the Palit GeForce RTX 2060 Super JetStream. Just to be sure, it's [RTX 2060 Super] JetStream and not RTX 2060 [Super JetStream]. You can tell the two apart by looking at the memory size. Unlike some other board partners, Palit used the same PCB as on its RTX 2070 products rather than its cheaper RTX 2060 PCB that happens to have 8 memory pads. This means you get the same electrical muscle as the company's premium RTX 2070 GameRock card. Palit also seems to have carried over the well-endowed dual-fan cooling solution Palit designed its GameRock cards out of. The card ships with a factory overclock of 1830 MHz GPU Boost.

Our coverage of the RTX Super Series custom-design launch day includes the following content:
MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Super Gaming X | Palit GeForce RTX 2060 Super JetStream | EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 Super SC Ultra | EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 Super FTW3 Ultra | ASUS ROG Strix RTX 2070 Super OC | MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming X Trio

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver disc
• Documentation

The Card

Palit's RTX 2060 Super JetStream looks identical to the RTX 2080 JetStream—huge cooler, this should be good. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate. Dimensions of the card are 29.5 x 13.0 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 regardless of whether the monitor is certified or not.


Palit is including a dual-BIOS feature on their card. The second BIOS runs at the same clocks and power limit as the primary BIOS, but supports idle fan stop and a quieter fan curve.


The board uses a 6-pin and an 8-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 watts of power draw.


The GeForce RTX 2060 Super does not support SLI.

Disassembly

Palit's cooler uses four heatpipes. It's impressive how Palit managed to cool GPU, memory, and VRM with just a single-piece thermal assembly.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

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).