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 leads us to believe that the RTX 2060 Super was part of NVIDIA's plans all along. It wouldn't surprise us to find out that most custom-design RTX 2060 Super graphics cards are based on the existing RTX 2060 PCBs with all memory pads populated, with only the very premium overclocked models using the larger PCB meant for the RTX 2070. With their custom-design boards, NVIDIA allows their 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 MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Super Gaming X. This card is based on the same board design as the RTX 2060 Gaming X, but with an additional power-phase, 8 GB of memory, and the better-endowed GPU. The card features MSI's compact rendition of the Twin Frozr 7 cooling solution that offers idle fan stop. MSI offers a factory overclock of 1695 MHz GPU Boost. The card sells at a $15 premium over the $399 MSRP for the RTX 2060 Super.

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
• Documentation

The Card

MSI's RTX 2060 Super Gaming X looks identical to the same model without the "Super", which of course make economical sense. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate. Dimensions of the card are 25x13 cm.


Installation requires two 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.


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 Super does not support SLI.

Disassembly

MSI's cooler uses four heatpipes.


Once the main heatsink has been removed, a second cooling plate becomes visible, which provides cooling for the memory chips. In the first picture, note how the thermal pad on the coils doesn't cover all of them; I haven't noticed any negative effects because of it, but still found it worth mentioning.


A third cooling plate ensures VRM temperatures don't go too high.


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).