Gadgetory

Kyle's new competitive strategy is to bring his contagion to CES and infect everybody which is what I think he got Luke to so bear with me for this one voiced a little hoarse but we have the EVGA r-tx 2060 to review today and this is the EXCI ultra model particularly looking at it versus the FE model from Nvidia and this is interesting because NVIDIA has been sort of encroaching on the territory of board partners with its founders edition designs now that it's gone dual axial for example and the price point is no longer special for the 2060 so you've got a $350 f/e model versus this and this is somewhere in the 370 to 380 range so a bit of a price difference but is it worth it is what we're looking at today before that this video is brought to you by the open bench table a lightweight and ultra portable test bench built with high quality anodized aluminum and with a modular approach to design the open bench table is easy to collapse store and assemble to test different parts and as one of the test benches that we use in the GN labs the open bench table contains everything you need to test PC builds and configurations and it's available in silver black red and a mini ITX version learn more at the link in the description below let me keep this one really short and to the point today so that none of us has to be down with the sickness longer than necessary so the primary test in here is on thermals noise and overclocking because ultimately when you're looking at two video cards of the same silicon tire with GTX or at RT X 2060 its thermals that's really what you're comparing and ultimately silicon quality will dictate overclocking to some extent the cooler to some extent and then beyond that the stock performance pretty much identical because it's is the same GPU it's similar frequencies so in games you're not going to see much of a difference but there's still value to an aftermarket card and most of that is going to be in things like silence or just better cooling more efficient cooling overall so EVGA is card here the XE ultra it's very similar to the FE card there's one difference that's the ml/cc components one of the ml/cc components has changed which reduces some of the wine that coil lines all the coils that typically it's one of the other components on the board so that's been changed and at least on our you and I here the review unit we don't hear any wine whereas we did with the Effie model now it's hard to say with a sample size of one for each but it should be improved on e BGA's versus Nvidia's cooler design is simple it's a two slot card with two fans so sizing form factor is the same as the Effie card it is significantly easier to take apart which is a benefit it has a zero rpm mode which is a benefit for some of you from a noise standpoint but otherwise it's pretty simple and pretty pretty much the same as the Effie card so let's get into it go through the thermals noise and overclock and we'll look at like two games just to kind of give you an idea of why it doesn't make sense to compare in games because it's the same GPU so it's gonna perform the same but we'll look at a couple anyway just to illustrate that point for the power virus thermal chart we're plotting temperature of the GPU core a hot spot MOSFET and a memory module near the memory vrm the EVGA r-tx 2060 XE ultra lens it's GPU temperature at 67 degrees Celsius its stock target operating a fan speed of about 2,000 rpm MOSFET thermals landed at 76 degrees Celsius with memory thermals at about 80 degrees Celsius these are well within spec and nowhere near problematic GDD are six can take about 90 to 95 degrees under spec with MOSFETs taking 125 to 150 degrees Celsius EVGA is cooler is fine and a vacuum but we need to see how it does versus the slightly cheaper Founders edition card we can drop vram thermals to simplify the charge and then add founders edition thermals adding EFI GPU thermals to the chart we see that Nvidia's card averages about one to two degrees higher in significance in the grand scheme of things this is with a fan speed of about 1700 rpm and the founders Edition MOSFET plots at 3 degrees higher than EVGA running 78 degrees Celsius instead of 75 to 76 degrees and it's also insignificant in its differences let's next compare the 3dmark frequency and thermals versus the founders Edition and XC ultra cards starting first with the EVGA XC ultra at stock settings we see out-of-the-box thermals ramping the 67 degrees Celsius it's target temperature remember that ambience is controlled and constant at about 22 degrees for these tests that accounted for in results tallying the XE ultra ramps harder to its 67 degree temperature as its fans start from 0 rpm and climb once passing a threshold the XC ultras frequency runs at 1935 megahertz core stable throughout the test falling from about 2000 as a starting point plotting the founders edition card now we see temperature ramped to about 68 to 69 degrees occasionally peaking at 70 degrees Celsius the climb is more gradual as the minimum fan speed is close to 800 rpm the frequency climbs to about 1930 5 megahertz peak and falls to eighteen seventy-five megahertz sustained while that is a difference it isn't all that meaningful in terms of frame rate or frame times regardless evey J's car does run faster on average with GPU core thermals marginally different at best so even detect these thermal differences requires strict testing routines so you wouldn't realistically notice the GPU core difference in day-to-day use finally normalizing both coolers to 40 DBA to equalize the playing field we see the results in the chart now rather than plot these slowly we'll just show it as it is the fe + XC ultra cards both hit the same mosfet temperature of 73 degrees with GPU temperature reaching 64 to 66 degrees on each device these are roughly within error margins or close enough to be indistinguishable for the EVGA card unfortunately it performs functionally equivalently to the Nvidia r-tx 2060 fe card this speaks miles to Nvidia's new efforts to make actually good coolers with the company only significantly behind in its assembly efforts moving on to just noise testing we must first note that EVGA XE ultra has a zero rpm mode something that the founders Edition card doesn't have this coupled with the fact that our EVGA XE ultra model had no coil whine means that the 26 the XE ultra produces effectively no noise under minimal loads the fan speeds up to about 38 DBA at 1850 rpm 41 DBA at 2200 rpm and 55.4 if you were to ever set it to maximum fan speeds the Nvidia founders Edition meanwhile plots one two two DBA hire at any given a fan rpm this is good for EVGA value proposition but as we saw in the previous chart Nvidia's cooler is functionally equivalent in most thermal testing at a given DBA EVGA Incans been faster at the same volume but cool similarly to Nvidia's fe at a lower RPM and equivalent noise level the only major advantage here is that EVGA s card didn't have any noticeable coil whine this can vary from card to card overclocking always comes down to silicon quality more than anything else but good coolers will aid in higher overclocks as a result of lower thermals in this instance putting an OC stepping chart on the screen we see the EB jxe ultra struggling to get beyond an offset of 130 megahertz core landing it's stable average frequency at twenty fifty five megahertz when that steady-state the memory frequency technically achieved an average offset of 930 megahertz and times pi had to be dropped to 900 megahertz and below in order to pass any games in testing furthermore a memory offset greater than 800 megahertz on average produced the worst results than stock testing providing evidence of memory errors and unstable over clocks that overall are less impressive than what we got in the founders edition model and this again is a silicon quality question speaking of let's add that OC stepping chart to the bottom half of the screen for the founders edition model with a similar maximum power to the EVGA card both at 185 to 190 watts the our TX 2060 F II ended up at about twenty thirty megahertz core at steady state or twenty fifty five peak the card was stable at memory offsets of over 900 megahertz and most tests though could achieve higher in some synthetic workloads EVGA XE ultra did not offer any advantages in overclocking to the founders Edition card games aren't particularly worth showing to illustrate differences as most of the advantage of an aftermarket card is its cooling solution it's noise levels and overclocking capabilities and we've already demonstrated limited improvements there but let's just walk through a few of our game tests to illustrate the real world framerate differences well strictly talk about 2060 cards here if you want to hear analysis on performance of other options watch or read the initial 2060 review with Sniper Elite for at 4k primarily for a synthetic load I was asking run so well we see the r-tx 20 60 XE ultra at 58 FPS average 1 stock with lows reasonably well timed and equally spaced to other tests overclocking gets it to about 60 FPS average proving troublesome for memory stability or finding it anyway the 26 TF e card performed lower when stock technically at 56 f BS average but this delta is undetectable to the player overclocking also provided meaningless gains at 61 FPS average when overclocked versus the 60 FPS of the XC Ultra overclocked note that the core offset gets both devices to roughly the same frequency as the XC Ultra starts at a higher baseline at 1080p Sniper Elite positions the cards similarly to the previous benchmarks EVGA XE ultra runs a higher frame rate out of the box at 156 FPS average version 151 FPS average but that's just from a higher stock boost clock beyond this differences are difficult to detect for a human player these are measurable differences but they're imperceptible ones shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1440p gives us an insightful look at the earlier references to unstable over clocks and this testing the EVGA r-tx 2060 XE ultra placed 70 FPS one stock average marginally improved over the founders edition at 60 at FPS that said the memory overclock of 840 megahertz to nine thirty megahertz offset produced worse results than stock this is indicative of memory errors and stability concerns reducing performance at more than healthiness even with a stable overclock the 2060 F II caps out at about 73 FPS average enough tuning would eventually get the EVGA card here as well but the silicon quality is more difficult to work with on our model than the FE card this will very card the card and is not guaranteed on any device including the FE regardless even with stable clocks there's no meaningful difference this is where it gets really interesting in the conclusion because since Nvidia is now good enough with their EFI design for 2060 not the same for the 2080s too much power there but for the 2060 andrea is pretty competitive and that comes back to what we were saying about how Nvidia is sort of starting to take market share from its board partners and the only downside there Nvidia doesn't have as much distribution power so they can't reach out into as many non-us regions as easily and many of mostly salsa and video comm so that's a hamstring as well but the board partners now have to compete with their supplier and that's hard because to express to really be competitive it needs to be at the same price as the Effie if you're really serious about wine then this theoretically should be better I can't 100% state with confidence that it's always better because we only have one so a sample size of one but it should be better if you're really neurotic about noise at low rpms or at low loads this is better because zero rpm mode but other than that there's not really any advantages and that's just kind of unfortunate and evj can't compete with nvidia at the same price point because EVGA has to buy the GPU from Nvidia and Vidya makes it for cost they don't buy it from anybody so as this goes on it'll be interesting to see if Nvidia starts forcing people out of the more affordable price classes if they don't establish that $100 difference between the EFI models and the cheapest board partner models which doesn't exist for the 20 to 60 and that's that's really kind of the the point of concern here is what happens to that board partner ecosystem because Nvidia is doing a few things that are a bit Apple like and and we find that concerning but objectively they're cooler on the 20 60 is good enough to be competitive with something like this and it's cheaper so it's probably on average better buy for the money unless you really care about the coil wide and you really care about geo rpm mode where you want it to be easy to service because this is six screws to get the cooler assembly off and then it's like another maybe eight or so to get the base plate offs pretty trivial really so there's the advantages of EVGA but just not a strong enough argument to really establish a firm reason to buy it at the higher price which is very unfortunate in this generation but if Nvidia is gonna push their partners to compete with better designs that's good it's just that Nvidia's got a bit of an unfair advantage there because they get the GPU for cost so hard to compete with that anyway not particularly worth buying unless you care about those specific scenarios deeply in which case it is worth buy I suppose but that's it for this one subscribe for more as always get a patreon.com slash gamer xanaxs to helps out directly and go to Kyle's channel and accuse him of getting me sick I'll see you all next time