MARCH 2020 PCWorld 81EVGA’s cheap RTX 2060 is much more
appealing at $50 less. It’s almost as fast as the
RX 5700 in most games, trading blows with the
excellent Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT
(go.pcworld.com/plrd), which costs $290.
AMD’s Radeon RX 5600 XT had a messy
launch, however, with some models being
much faster (go.pcworld.com/fscd) than
others thanks to a last-second BIOS upgrade.
The first wave of faster cards on store shelves
will probably require users to upgrade their
BIOS to get the additional performance. The
EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO is significantly
faster than Radeon RX 5600 XT models that
don’t get upgraded memory speeds, and
that’s the majority currently—faster, upgraded
models are few and far between.
EVGA’s card doesn’t have to deal with any
of that software headache. It just works out of
the box. And that price. At $300, the KO
undercuts most dual-fan RTX 2060 models by
$40 or more, delivering excellent gaming
performance at a steep discount. Better yet, at
$300 and with performance comparable to
the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT, you’re
basically only paying a $10 premium for
real-time ray tracing. The cutting-edge lighting
technology is still is in its infancy, with only a
handful of games supporting it thus far, but it’s
very much on the upswing and well worth the
investment in for such a minimal surcharge.
Nvidia’s own GeForce RTX 2060
Founders Edition (go.pcworld.com/60fd)
dropped to $300 to counter the Radeon RX