ASUS GeForce RTX 2060 STRIX OC review (Page 32)

ASUS GeForce RTX 2060 STRIX OC review

Graphics cards 1048 Page 32 of 32 Published 2019-01-30 13:46 by Hilbert Hagedoorn

Conclusion

Final words and verdict

The RTX 2060 STRIX is an impressive graphics card, however, when I just looked up the prices I nearly choked. The RTX 2060 series should sit in the 350 USD / 365 EUR range and the cheapest you'll find this STRIX OC edition for is a mind-numbing € 449,- for that money you'd be better off with a more value RTX 2070. Make no mistake, ASUS has a lovely offering at hand with the card. This 6GB card offers proper performance and is boosting to 1830 MHz right out of the box. And that gives it a 4% advantage over the reference card from NVIDIA while still having room left to be tweaked. It's also a nice looking card (although that is subjective). The build quality is top notch in components, it shows a very clean PCB and the card has been reinforced with front and backplates. The fun thing about the RTX 2060 is that the factory tweaked products as shown today, close in at the RTX 2070 performance level, in fact, it's a shy 5% away from it. As such any GeForce RTX 2060 series positions will sit best in the FullHD and (W)QHD resolution monitor ranges. And yes, that latter one is the new mainstream these days. At 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 or something close you'll see very decent game performance, it, however, will not be a card suitable in the Ultra HD range for all modern game titles. At Full HD the RT and tensor cores will be sufficient enough, at WQHD that will become more challenging (but that depends on the game title). How the new technologies and the actual engine will behave (is it powerful enough) is something only the future will tell. Performance wise you are looking at the GTX 1070 (Ti) / 1080 on raw shader perf, added benefits are of course the RT and Tensor cores. If you stick to the aforementioned resolutions your games will run at proper framerates with the very best image quality. The 6 GB graphics memory is sufficient here. In terms of multi-GPU setups, NVIDIA does not allow SLI for the RTX 2060 and 2070 series.

Aesthetics

It's a good looking card (albeit I do feel STRIX is overdue for a design change), the factory tweak is really nice. It sits in the upper segment, was made a little darker to look at, and that works for me. The RGB lighting effects are funky to see. That LED inclusion that has been done subtly and can be configured in any manner you prefer with AURA SYNC software, the choice is yours. While I always will remain skeptical about backplates (they potentially can trap heat and thus warm up the PCB) ASUS does have vents there. The flip-side is that they can look better and can protect your PCB and components from damage and, well, they can look nice as they can have a certain aesthetic appeal. I have to admit, this is looking very nice but looks are always personal, of course. So in the end, on looks, you certainly get that premium feel of detailed aesthetics and quality.

Cooling & Noise Levels

Cooling is a choice with the STRIX, silent mode sits at roughly 62 Degrees C while gaming and that is great. You can get it to 55 Degrees C in performance mode, at the cost of increased fan RPM and an increased noise level. Honestly, we advise the silent mode and let things be as they are. We've have heard noticeable coil whine, please be aware of that. But I do want to note that any graphics card at a high-enough FPS will make some coil-whine.

Overclocking

We've been able to push another ~10% of extra perf out of the card compared to the reference card. Both traditional overclocking, as well as the OC Scanner, reached roughly that level. The combination of memory, power and voltage settings will bring you a proper overclock. Once you've applied it, you get a few percent more performance. Nice to see is that we have been able to reach roughly 16 Gbps on the memory, and that does help.

Concluding

ASUS delivers a terrific product here with that excellent cooler and dark style as well. It's really silent in silent BIOS mode, cools great and offers performance and tweaking levels on the GPU that are really good. None of the RTX 2060 cards have NVLINK or even the simple form of SLI, that is starting to bother me more and more as time passes. Then again, the challenges that SLI and multi-GPU solutions bring, I do not miss either. Pricing, however, is everything, and 459 EUR / and in a 439 USD range, obviously is just too much. From a hardware point of view though, the card ticks most if not all of the right boxes. It is a lovely product, a top pick even, however, the RTX 2060 is to be a mainstream segmented card, and closing in at 460 EUR it simply doesn't make much sense as the step towards RTX 2070 would be the Spock path (logic) to follow. The card overall would easily deserve a recommended or even better award, but we'll issue an award once the price has dropped towards an acceptable level.