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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zepi - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
Watching with disgust due to high power usage and noise. I won't upgrade to something that sounds as bad as my current AMD card.eva02langley - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
HBM2 and GDDR6 are fairly at the same price even without the actual numbers. GDDR6 is 70% more expensive than the GDDR5.But yeah, Koduri mistake was to push HBM2 on Vega, it should have been GDDR5 or GDDR5x.
CiccioB - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
This legend that HBM costs like the other kind of memory is in place since people stated that HBM cost like GDDR5 (then it was against the lowly available GDDR5Xm produced only by Micron) and that using it against 12 chip of GDDR5/X/6 and the complexity needed for the PCB layout to handle them was almost the same.Unfortunatelty nothing of this is true.
HBM costs more per chip (and by GB) by itself for its construction that requires a high end process for stacking up all those layers.
Moreover, it requires a big silicon interposer that is expensive enough to cover the cost of any GDDRn memory type based PCB.
Third it requires a different path for mounting and aligning it on the interposer that is also an expensive procedure (see the problems AMD encountered for it) and that can't be done in the AIB fabs where GDDRn chips are usually mounted and soldered for 0,01$ each chip.
What AMD fanboys constantly states is their hope that AMD is not going to loose so much money for any Vega that they are selling. Unfortunately, they are, and this new video card by nvidia will make even more hard pressure on Vega as we already have announcements of further price cuts on such an expensive piece of crap that can't compete with anything in any market it has been presented and has required the constant price cut even before it was launched. In fact Vega FE cards started discounted by $200 at day one with respect to the former announced MSRP price... what a marvelous debut!
Ratman6161 - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
Totally beaten in raw performance, yes. But I don't want it anywhere near badly enough to pay $349 for it. What you can actually buy for what I would be willing to spend is the Rx580 or GTX1060 at under $200.mapesdhs - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
zepi, if all one wants is normal 1080p gaming then an RX 580 is a much better buy, especially used. Mine only cost 138 UKP. The real joke here is the price hiking of the entire midraange segment. The 2060 is what should have been the 2050. People are paying almost double for no real speed upgrade compared to two years ago at the next teir up (which should have been what the 2070 is now). Tech sites know this, some talked about it early on, but now they've all caved in to the new 2x higher pricing schema, the only exception being Paul at "not an apple fan" who continues to point out this nonense. If people go ahead and buy these products then the prices will keep going up. And AMD will follow suit, they'd be mad not to from a business standpoint.Opencg - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
I would not expect the 2060 to be anywhere near msrp considering its the only turing card with a reasonable msrp/performance ratio the demand will be high. And we all know what happens when demand is high.Bluescreendeath - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
@Benedict, Did you even read the article? The GTX2060 is more than 50% faster than the RX580 and the GTX1060. Furthermore, the GTX1060 6GBs cost around the same as the RX580 - the 1060 is not "much more expensive."mapesdhs - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
Feel free to spend 100% more than what x60 cards used to cost, for a performance level that should be the tier below, but don't complain when the prices get hiked again because consumers keep buying this ripoff junk.kpb321 - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
If you want the best price/performance you need to go a little bit lower than the 580. The 570's have been ~$130 AR pretty regularly with a couple dips below that. Personally, I picked up an 8gb 570 for $190 with three stacked rebates/GCs for a total of $90 off bringing the cost of the card down to $100. I also sold off my old video card and one of the games from the bundle for another $50 bringing my upgrade cost down to ~$50. I had been wanting to upgrade for a while and was hoping for a 580 or a 1060 3gb or 6gb but the 570 looked like such a good deal I couldn't resist. Yes it was quite a bit of rebates but at this point I've gotten all of them so that is my final AR cost. Granted this even further down the performance curve but a 8gb 570 is certainly going to be a lot better than %50 of the performance of an 8gb 580 but that's what I paid for mine.zaza - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
the rx 570 can be found for 140$-150$ now and comes with your choice of 2 games out of three (unreleased games) (devil may cry, divison 2 and Resident evil 2 remake). for that price i think fir 570 is best GPU for the price, great for 1080p gaming.