MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming Z 6 GB Review

Item: MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming Z 6 GB
Author: TPU Staff

W1zzard

on Jan 18th, 2019,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: MSI

Architecture & Features »

Introduction

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 around a week ago. 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).

MSI's GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming Z ticks all the feature checkboxes. It comes with the idle-fan-stop feature that's missing on the Founders Edition and provides some extra bling through its adjustable RGB lighting. The thermal solution has been beefed up as well—it's now triple slot with two fans. Out of the box, the card comes overclocked to a boost frequency of 1830 MHz, which is the highest of all the RTX 2060 cards announced so far.

According to MSI, their GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming Z will retail between $379 and $389, so we used $385 throughout this review for our calculations.

GeForce RTX 2060 Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX 580	$185	2304	32	1257 MHz	1340 MHz	2000 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX 590	$260	2304	32	1469 MHz	1545 MHz	2000 MHz	Polaris 30	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 1060 3 GB	$200	1152	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	3 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1060	$210	1280	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 980 Ti	$390	2816	96	1000 MHz	1075 MHz	1750 MHz	GM200	8000M	6 GB, GDDR5, 384-bit
R9 Fury X	$380	4096	64	1050 MHz	N/A	500 MHz	Fiji	8900M	4 GB, HBM, 4096-bit
GTX 1070	$320	1920	64	1506 MHz	1683 MHz	2002 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX Vega 56	$370	3584	64	1156 MHz	1471 MHz	800 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1070 Ti	$380	2432	64	1607 MHz	1683 MHz	2000 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RTX 2060 FE	$350	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
MSI RTX 2060 Gaming Z	$385	1920	48	1365 MHz	1830 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
GTX 1080	$460	2560	64	1607 MHz	1733 MHz	1251 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5X, 256-bit
RX Vega 64	$400	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti	$675	3584	88	1481 MHz	1582 MHz	1376 MHz	GP102	12000M	11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RTX 2070	$500	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070 FE	$600	2304	64	1410 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit