NVIDIA earlier this month launched its most important GeForce RTX 20-series graphics card, the RTX 2060, along the sidelines of CES 2019. With a list price of $349, this card is designed for affordable 1440p gaming with all details cranked up, including real-time raytracing RTX features. The de facto reference-design RTX 2060 rendition, dubbed Founders Edition, was reviewed last week. The RTX 2060 is a primarily partner-driven launch, which means there could be dozens of custom-design graphics card models from NVIDIA's various add-in card partners (AICs). The RTX 2060 was rumored to come in half a dozen sub-variants based on memory size and type, although in the end, NVIDIA only launched the top-spec variant with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. Perhaps, NVIDIA is saving the other SKUs up for when its GTX 1060 inventories are sufficiently off the shelves and spring-summer sets in. NVIDIA carved the RTX 2060 out from the same silicon as the RTX 2070, the 12 nm Turing "TU106." This means you very much do get RT cores and Tensor cores, and NVIDIA wants you to enjoy real-time ray-traced gaming with this card, particularly with RTX enabled, and NVIDIA's ambitious new image-quality innovation, DLSS (deep-learning super-sampling).  The RTX 2060 is equipped with 1,920 CUDA cores, which is a huge step up from the GTX 1060 6 GB (1,280), spread across 30 out of 36 streaming multiprocessors on the "TU106." You hence get 30 RT cores and 240 tensor cores. NVIDIA narrowed the memory bus width of this chip down to 192-bit and equipped it with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 14 Gbps, resulting in 336 GB/s of memory bandwidth (roughly on par with that of a GTX 980 Ti). EVGA's GeForce RTX 2060 XC Ultra is the company's highest-specced RTX 2060 variant. It comes factory overclocked with a large boost clock increase to 1830 MHz, which is the highest of any announced card so far. EVGA extended the length of their card, so it works with a larger cooler, which should help with thermals. The EVGA RTX 2060 XC Ultra will retail for $380. We also spent a little time overclocking the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 XC, to see what kind of additional performance it had lurking under the hood. Before we get to our results, though, we would like to quickly re-cap Turing's new GPU Boost algorithm and cover some new overclocking related features. Overclocking NVIDIA's TuringTuring-based GeForce RTX cards, like the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 XC, feature GPU Boost 4.0. Like previous-gen GeForce cards, GPU Boost scales frequencies and voltages upwards, power and temperature permitting, based on the GPU's workload at the time. Should a temperature or power limit be reached, however, GPU Boost 4.0 will only drop down to the previous boost frequency/voltage stepping and not the base frequency in an attempt to bring power and temperatures down gradually. Where GPU Boost 3.0 could result in a steep drop-off down to the base frequency when constrained, GPU Boost 4.0 is more granular and should allow for higher average frequencies over time. As we mentioned in our previous coverage of the Turing architecture, there are beefier VRMs on GeForce RTX cards versus their predecessors, which should help with extreme overclocking, though most of the cards are still being power limited to prevent damage and ensure their longevity. In addition to being able to handle higher loads than previous-gen cards though, the power circuitry on RTX cards has also been optimized to smooth-out and clean-up power delivery across the entire voltage and frequency curve. That cleaner power should improve maximum overclocks too, but NVIDIA is also trying to make the overclocking process itself much easier with a new Scanner tool and API. The NVIDIA Scanner is a one-click overclocking tool with an intelligent testing algorithm and specialized workload designed to help users find the maximum, stable overclock on their particular cards without having to resort to trial and error. The NVIDIA Scanner will try higher and higher frequencies at a given voltage step and then test for stability with a specialized workload along the way. The entire process should take around 20 minutes if it works, but when it’s done, the Scanner will have found the maximum stable overclock throughout the entire frequency and voltage curve for a given card. Unfortunately, the Scanner tool was hanging on our testbed, so we couldn't properly test the auto-scan feature with our benchmarks. This is after multiple BIOS updates and clean Windows installations, multiple NVIDIA driver revisions, and many updates to Precision X1 -- there's just something about our test setup that the software just doesn't like. In lieu of using the NVIDIA Scanner, we kept things simple, and used the frequency offset and power / temperature target sliders to manually overclock the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 XC. First we cranked up the power target to 114% (the maximum available) and kicked up the temperature target as well. Then we bumped up the max voltage by .1v and increased the GPU and memory clocks until the test system was no longer stable or showed on-screen artifacts. When all was said and done, we hit the 2.07GHz mark on the GPU and hit an effective memory speed just shy of 7.1GHz. While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran some tests and saw some nice performance gains. In fact, the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 XC was able to overtake the GeForce GTX 1080 in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider while overclocked and it inches closer to the 2070 in 3DMark. Total System Power Consumption Tested at the Outlet Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points regarding power consumption and acoustics. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored noise output and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idle and also while under a heavy gaming workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone. It's a relative measurement that gives you a decent view of how much additional power draw a graphics card is placing on a system while gaming. The EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 XC consumed only slightly more power than NVIDIA's reference offering, which you would expect given its higher boost clock, and is roughly in-line with the GTX 1080. We should also mention that GPU temperatures are not a concern on the EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 XC. At idle, the GPU temp hovered in the mid-30 degree C range. And under sustained load, even while overclocked, the GPU temperature never even came close the peak target. The maximum GPU temperature we saw was 75ºC. Noise output wasn't a concern either. The EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 XC was quiet throughout our testing, despite overclocking and many hours of benchmarking. The fan does spin up to audible levels when the card is warmed up and under load, but it's not loud by any stretch. |
