72 PCWorld MARCH 2020REVIEWS EVGA GEFORCE RTX 2060 KO
to hit the $300 mark, but they’re wholly
reasonable tweaks, and the lower price point
makes Nvidia’s entry-level ray-tracing option
much more appealing. So does EVGA’s $300
GeForce RTX 2060 KO and overclocked
$320 RTX 2060 KO Ultra manage to knock
out AMD’s latest GPU? And what about
Nvidia’s own RTX 2060 Founders Edition (go.
pcworld.com/60fd), which just received a
price cut to $300 itself (go.pcworld.
com/300c)? Let’s dig in.SPECS, FEATURES,
AND PRICE
Surprise! The EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO
doesn’t use the TU106 GPU found inside
other GeForce RTX 2060 cards, at least in our
review sample. Instead, it revolves around a
version of the TU104 GPU found inside the
much more powerful GeForce RTX 2080, but
cut-down to match TU106’s specifications.
That means the EVGA KO packs the same
1,920 CUDA cores and 30 dedicated
ray-tracing cores as other RTX 2060s, tied to
the same 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a
192-bit bus, bringing the total overall
memory bandwidth to a blistering 336Gbps.
It behaves exactly like its TU106-based
siblings in both gaming and ray-tracing
performance in our testing. Gamers Nexus
(go.pcworld.com/gnxs) discovered one key
performance difference: The TU104-based
EVGA KO performs up to 57 percent faster in
Blender rendering tasks. That’s a very nicheGPU ENGINE SPECS
Nvidia CUDA cores 1,920
RTX-OPS 37T
Giga Rays/s 5
Boost Clock (MHz) 1,680
Base Clock (MHz) 1,365MEMORY SPECS
Memory Speed 14 Gbps
Standard Memory Config 6 GB GDDR6
Memory Interface Width 192-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) 336 GB/suse case, but if you use Blender, it’s enough
to push you toward the EVGA KO over rival
RTX 2060 models.
EVGA offers two different variants (go.
pcworld.com/2dif). The $300 GeForce RTX
2060 KO (go.pcworld.com/gfko) sticks to
the GPU’s stock 1,680MHz Boost clock
speeds, while the $320 EVGA RTX 2060 KO
Ultra (go.pcworld.com/koul) offers a mild
overclock to 1,755MHz. You can overclock
them further yourself, but EVGA prevents
users from increasing the power limit to keep
from overloading the board’s 4-phase VRM.
The KO and KO Ultra are identical other than
the clock speeds. We’re reviewing both
configurations: EVGA sent us the Ultra model
along with the BIOS for the cheaper version,
so we could test both.