The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB Founders Edition Review: Not Quite Mainstream
by Nate Oh on January 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTPower, Temperature, and Noise
As always, we'll take a look at power, temperature, and noise of the RTX 2060 Founders Edition, though most of the highlights and trends we've seen twice before with the RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070 Founders Edition launches. For the most part, the dual axial fan open air design provide straightforward benefits in lower noise and cooling, which counterbalences the atypically large GPUs and new fixed-function hardware.
As this is a new GPU, we will quickly review the GeForce RTX 2060's stock voltages and clockspeeds as well.
| NVIDIA GeForce Video Card Voltages | ||
| Model | Boost | Idle |
| GeForce RTX 2060 (6GB) Founders Edition | 1.050V | 0.725V |
| GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition | 1.050v | 0.718v |
| GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition | 1.062v | 0.625v |
The voltages are broadly comparable to the preceding 16nm GTX 1070. In comparison to pre-FinFET generations, these voltages are exceptionally lower because of the FinFET process used, something we went over in detail in our GTX 1080 and 1070 Founders Edition review. As we said then, the 16nm FinFET process requires said low voltages as opposed to previous planar nodes, so this can be limiting in scenarios where a lot of power and voltage are needed, i.e. high clockspeeds and overclocking. Of course, Turing (along with Volta, Xavier, and NVSwitch) are built on 12nm "FFN" rather than 16nm, but there is little detail on the exact process tweaks.
Power Consumption
The TDP increase to 160W brings the RTX 2060 (6GB) in between the 180W GTX 1080/1070 Ti and 150W GTX 1070. In turn, load consumption is more-or-less on that level, and nothing dissimilar to what we've seen. This also means that efficiency is around the same relative to performance, as opposed to the RTX 2070, 2080, and 2080 Ti.
Temperature & Noise
With an open air cooler design with dual axial fans, the results are in line with what we've seen with the other RTX Founders Editions.
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richough3 - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
I would wait a few generations before I would purchase a video card for it's ray tracing abilities. The main reason I would buy any high end card is for FPS, because in competitive gaming, FPS is king, so any visual quality feature would be at minimum setting or turned off anyway.nunya112 - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
AMD is about to have its best year for video cards mark my words!NVidia have launched a product that while on paper and technology wise is awesome. however. the physical hardware Is not capable to use that technology. im referring to RTX its too slow. And NV is asking a premium for it. NVidia has made AMD's job very easy.
all AMD hasto do is. provide good cards MUCH CHEAPER and they will own at least 50% of GPU market.
webdoctors - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
Yo how much do you get paid to post? Can I do it too from home? We can split the referral bonus. Make me an offer, could use quick cash.nunya112 - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
I bought a 580 8gb for 199 Australian just before Xmas. was because they all had excess supply again from all the miners. well we all know what happened there! It crashed faster than a meth head would on sunday afternoon after being up for 3 days. and they all had ROOMS full of video cards. knowing one of the bigger etailers boss personally. they had so much excess stock. they were going to throw out low end cards because they didnt have room for more expensive products in the warehouse! for instance they had 6 pallets of of gigabyte aurorus 580's and the next day 590's were being delivered. luckily when they dropped to $199AU a lot of ppl picked them up. they still made a profit.moral here is AMD needs to compete with NV for nothing. set their own low prices that they still make 15% on and spank NV
Sherlock - Tuesday, January 8, 2019 - link
Couple of points :1) Nvidia's strategy - which seems to have backfired - was to hope that RayTracing will take off in a big way - and put all its eggs in that basket. Nvidia added in specialized hardware to support RT, which has effectively priced it out of the mainstream market and has to add in "features" like DLSS to convince the consumer that they are getting a good deal @ $350 for what is essentially a 1080p class GPU - equivalent performance from the "traditional" GPU's is available ~$200
2) RayTracing will not take off until it is supported on the XBox and PS as a majority of the games are developed with those platforms in mind. Considering AMD is rumored (confirmed??) to supply the CPU/GPU for the next-gen consoles - unless AMD starts supporting RayTracing this gen - Nvidia has essentially wasted hardware resources and consumer money on something that is completely useless. By the time we have software that uses RT in a meaningful way - these Nvidia cards will be redundant
nunya112 - Wednesday, January 9, 2019 - link
it wont take off because the current hardware can not run it very well. its good on paper, and great to show. but this should have been released next year with a faster chip. because when RTX is on FPS hits so low.CiccioB - Wednesday, January 9, 2019 - link
Next year, with the right HW, nvidia wll have all developers ready to create optimized RT games (unlike BF5). You just look a the finger, not what it it point at.And if the weapon in AMD hands is slowing the technological progress because they have the monopoly in the console market, well, let me say it, I hope that AMD will die soon.
saiga6360 - Wednesday, January 9, 2019 - link
Foolish. If you think nvidia can bring ray tracing to the masses by its lonesome, then you are dreaming. They have to charge you hundreds and thousands just for that finger as you call it, that must be the middle finger because it's not going to get the point across. Just for anything to become a standard, be it 2K, 4K, adaptive sync, it needs to be affordable and for that to happen AMD and Intel needs to get on board.808Hilo - Friday, January 11, 2019 - link
Nvidia marketing fantasy to counter another nonsensical product...580. Just build one top card and sell many. Then build another one. As it seems we are stuck on 1080 performance four years in a row. Lame.Ravenmaster - Saturday, January 12, 2019 - link
It's a 1070Ti