EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO: Ray tracing gets affordable
The EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO offers something for everybody.
Gamers like you and me get a custom GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card and all its benefits—great 1080p gaming, good 1440p gaming, and real-time ray tracing—for just $300, a full $50 below the RTX 2060’s suggested price. EVGA steals the spotlight in a crucial segment of the market by significantly undercutting its competitors. And Nvidia gets to clear out stock for a different GPU, surprisingly enough, while fielding a headache-free rival to the new $280 Radeon RX 5600 XT.
Okay, maybe AMD doesn’t get anything out of it.
EVGA’s graphics card cuts some corners 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, which just received a price cut to $300 itself? 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 discovered one key performance difference: The TU104-based EVGA KO performs up to 57 percent faster in Blender rendering tasks. That’s a very niche use case, but if you use Blender, it’s enough to push you toward the EVGA KO over rival RTX 2060 models.
