Gadgetory

welcome back to harem box today we are gonna compare the cheapest r-tx 2060 graphics card you can buy right now to one of the most expensive are TX 2060 graphics cards you can buy right now at least from MSI anyway now the reason I'm doing this is because I'm often asked if it's worth spending a little bit extra to get a graphics card such as this gaming Zed model over something like the Ventus XS right now you can purchase the base model Ventus excess for three hundred and fifty dollars u.s. and that is of course the MSRP for the GeForce r-tx 2060 however there are plenty of options priced above the MSRP such as MSI's most premium model the gaming Zed which currently sells for three hundred and ninety dollars u.s. and that makes it well it makes it quite a bit cheaper than an RT X 2070 so it's not encroaching on base model RT X 2017 pricing by any stretch of the imagination and it also means that it's only about eleven percent more expensive in this particular card and that's not too bad but I'd say at this price range was sort of getting into the cutoff we're spending more money really starts to hurt the value of the product still if you're planning on keeping a graphics card for at least two years to spending an extra $40 really matter I guess well it depends on what you're getting and that's exactly what many of you have been asking me so let's compare the Ventus and gaming Zed models head-to-head to work out if the premiums worth it right off the bat I can tell you guys the price hike isn't some kind of scam MSI and other board partners simply don't produce the same graphics card then give the premium model a factory overclock and call it a day there are some real differences between these graphics cards of course certain models do have a receiver Asians that cost extra ten dollars but yeah that's not what we're talking about here comparing the Ventus access to the gaming Z I can tell you they are two very differently designed graphics cards and what the outcome of that is we'll know in a moment but let's first quickly compare the physical design of each model as you can plainly see the gaming Z is a physically larger graphics card but it's more than just a larger PCB in French it's called RGB lighting after all it's true there are some fancy lighting effects but we don't really care about those for this comparison getting back on track it's 38 percent heavier thanks to a much larger cooler featuring a copper baseplate and many copper heat pipes the aluminium cooler is also of higher quality featuring significantly more fins I'd estimate there's roughly twice as much surface area to dissipate heat with on the gaming Zed heatsink the vent is ex heatsink on the other hand it's much more basic affair you just get a single copper heat pipe that comes in direct contact with a GPU die so there's no copper base plate here as I said it so much more simplistic design however both do feature a pair of 85 millimeter fans but whereas the Ventus fans have 11 blades each the gaming Zed fan packs 14 and this allows it to move a little more air but real crucially maintain higher static pressure at the same rpm so that'll help push more air through that heatsink then moving out of the PCB we see that both models feature the same IO configuration so nothing out of the ordinary there and they both have the same eight pin power input however the larger more expensive gaming Zed model packs a 5 plus 2 phase verum whereas the Ventus gets a 4 plus 2 phase varium this should help the gaming Zed run a little cooler and hopefully it will improve overclocking though to be fair all our TX 2060 graphics cards are quite limited in this respect now out of the box the gaming Zed maintains a typical operating frequency of 1950 megahertz and at this frequency operates at 73 degrees in a 21 degree room with a fan speed of 1700 rpm this means it is virtually silent and you certainly can't hear it in a really quiet system the ventures on the other hand that operated at around 1845 to 1800 and 60 megahertz and in the same test peak to just 70 degrees though the fans were operating slightly faster at 1900 rpm though again in a quiet system you really won't be able to hear this graphics card this means out of the box the gaming Zed's GPU clock speed was operating somewhere between 4 to 6% faster and I guess the question now is how much of a difference does this make in the real world to find out we have a few quick gaming benchmarks that have been conducted on our standard core Oh $9.99 or okay GPU test rig first up we have f1 2018 and here the biggest margin you'll find is just three percent and for the most part you're really looking at two percent or less given the margin of error is one to two percent it's fair to say in terms of performance there's virtually no difference between these two r-tx 2060 models and it's not just F 1 2018 where we see virtually no difference either we see the same thing when testing with far cry new dawn in fact here we don't even see a 3 percent difference and we're moving a strange Brigade we see the same story once again despite pushing over 130 FPS on average at 1080p we're only seeing a 2 FPS difference at most and then lastly we have World War Z and once again it's more of the same out of the box the Ventus excess and gaming Z versions of MSI GTX 2060 deliver near enough to the same performance now let's talk overclocking looking at the Ventus first our particular retail card couldn't maintain a 2 gigahertz operating frequency at least without crashing and they still limit us to 1980 megahertz still that's at least a six percent overclock at this frequency the GPU hit just 70 degrees but the fans did spin up to 2100 rpm and here I could just hear them over the case fans the gaming said on the other hand maintained 2040 megahertz quite easily with the fan set to order they spun at just nineteen hundred and fifty rpm and he actually lowered the GPU temperature from the 70 degrees we saw out of the box for just 67 degrees so quite an impressive result there now I'm not going to go over any performance graphs you overclock these cards were within 1 FPS of each other and both were boosted by about 5 to 6 percent when compared to the out-of-the-box performance and I'll just lastly say I'd really only use this overclocking information as a rough guide as as you really are playing the silicon lottery here so it's quite possible you could get a ventus model that could match or even beat a gaming Zed model when it comes to overclocking but as we've just seen it doesn't really matter too much which card hits the outright highest frequency because the results are going to be much the same anyway the premium mid-range graphics card debate is an interesting one from a design standpoint the gaming Z is clearly the superior product in every regard for a relative small investment you do get a much better quality cooler a slightly better PCB design and a slightly more aggressive factory overclock unfortunately all this accounts for very little when dealing with an ultra-efficient 160 watt TDP graphics card that essentially overclocks itself on paper the gaming Zen is clock seven percent higher but in reality the operating frequency can almost be half that we're still performance doesn't scale linearly with frequency so this means a seven percent frequency boost will often result in just a four or maybe five percent performance boost and sometimes it can even be less than that so the gaming Zed might be a better quality product but even at just an 11% price premium it doesn't offer an 11 percent improvement in anything not FPS performance not cooling performance and not operating volume and even if you could stack all the advantages together the very slight performance increase the slightly better cooling and the slight improvement and operating volume even if you pack all that together I'm not sure it justifies dishing out the extra cash in short if you're after maximum value always stick with the models that meet the MSRP consider spending ten dollars more if it gets you a noticeably better model maybe one with three fans but other than that I just stick with the base models having said all that if you've got a little bit of extra cash and I'm talking a little bit enough to get something like the gaming Zed model and not step up to the next level for something like an RT X 27 for $500 so yeah if you've got a bit of extra cash and for whatever reason you don't want to spend it on maybe something like an SSD or put it towards some sort of other upgrade for your computer it's your money you can do whatever you want with it so if you want to spend it on a slightly better graphics card then sure I suppose get a premium model if it makes you a bit more excited about the build a bit more a bit more proud of the purchase let's say and just lastly if you think the numbers here look a bit off you're expecting the gaming Zed model to be noticeably faster than the Ventus I'd suggest checking out this rather excellent video by mr. tech deals he made this earlier in the year it's a really really well done video I think so I'll link that in the video description basically he purchased half a dozen r-tx 2060 graphics cards with his own money and that included the beastly a soos ROG Strix model and if exactly what I have very little difference the Strix round over ten degrees cooler than the Venter so that's very impressive but due to the way GPU boost works it was just 1 to 2 FPS faster out of the box and I think that will do it for this one if you enjoyed the video be sure the like button you can subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the work we do at our box then consider supporting us on patreon you'll get access to our discord chat monthly livestream and all that good stuff anyway thank you for watching I'm your host Steve and I'll see you again next time you