The Card

The ZOTAC GeForce RTX 2060 AMP ships in a compact board design that's a little over 20 cm long and 11 cm tall to ensure maximum compatibility. The company is deploying its latest IceStorm 2.0 cooling solution, which consists of an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a pair of 90 mm fans.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one HDMI 2.0 and three DisplayPort 1.4 ports. Note how the USB-C connector that's been available on all other GeForce RTX 20 Series cards so far 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.


We shine the light from a self-leveling line laser on to the card, which shows no sagging.

Disassembly

ZOTAC's cooler uses three 6 mm-thick copper heatpipes with a dense aluminium heatsink that dissipates the heat in the airflow of the fans. This part of the cooler not only cools the GPU chip, but also the voltage regulation circuitry and memory.

We noticed that the heatsink has its fins arranged such that hot air is guided through the front and rear ends of the card, rather than the top. Such an arrangement provides less surface area for dissipation.


The black metal backplate provides protection for the card during handling and installation—note how nicely it wraps around the card.

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