Gadgetory

welcome back to our own box today we're taking a close look at MSI's flagship g-force r-tx 2060 graphics card the gaming Z in addition to the gaming Zed they've also got the Ventus and arrow ATX the Ventus is basically for everyone who couldn't pony up the extra dollar hoodoos for the gaming Zed and the Aero ITX is for those that couldn't afford the rest of their case since we do have a normal-sized PC case and saving $30 doesn't really interest us the gaming Zed it is now as a premium RT X 2060 model it comes in at $390 us the same price as the gigabyte gaming OC pro that we used for testing in our initial r-tx 2016 coverage so at a little over 10 percent more expensive than your run-of-the-mill RT X 2060 what is so special about the gaming Zed well for one it has a fat cooler it's actually well it's probably best described as a stocky cooler yeah this is without question the shortest high and our Tech's 2060 graphics card out there but at 52 millimeters wide I wouldn't call it compact it's a triple slot card so yeah its stocky it's very stocky the gaming Zed measures just 247 millimeters long and sure that makes it a little longer than the foundation model but it is shorter than other custom aib models at least in his price range such as gigabytes gaming OC pro which does measure two hundred and eighty millimeters long anyway point is it's not that long but it is very wide so bit of an interesting choice there from MSI it has to be said the card weighs in at 947 grams which is quite heavy and 508 grams of that weight is accounted for by the cooler the black-and-gray fan shroud looks quite good it's made from plastic but still looks very good and there's a few RGB highlights here and there for those of you who like a little bling embedded in the shroud or two 85 millimeter stalks 3.0 fans which remain inactive until the card or the GPU reaches and exceeds 60 degrees under the fan shroud we find two aluminium fin stacks one features a nickel plated copper base plate two six millimeter pipes and then the second bank of fins features four heat pipes now the cooler on this card is used solely to cool that tu 106 GPU the GDD are six memory and vram feature their own heat spreaders so this means the six one-gigabyte GDD are six modules are covered by a black aluminium heat spreader that weighs just 44 grams then we have an even smaller heat spreader over the verum it weighs just 27 grams so it will be very interesting to see just how hot the vrm and GDD are six memory get when gaming feeding power into the card is a single eight pin PCIe power connector which is more than sufficient and on the backside of the card we have a fancy-looking backplate that stretches the entire length of the PCB and the backplate itself weighs just 80 grams it's also insulated on the backside and doesn't feature any kind of thermal pads to remove heat that's built up on the rear side of the PCB around at the i/o panel there's three display ports and a single HDMI port pretty typical loadout for RTX 2060 graphics card has to be said overall the gaming Z looks pretty good but now it's time to find out if it really is any good so let's throw in the test system and find out for testing I don't want to go over a crazy amount of benchmarks we don't do these for these a IB card reviews in fact I really barely benchmark them at all truth be told they all deliver roughly the same performance out of the box almost always the performance variance between the slowest and fastest model is less than 5% however where they can differ quite substantially is in the cooling performance and operating volume so this is what I typically focus on with my reviews power consumption can also vary a bit depending on how aggressive the board partners are with their bios overclocking I feel is another metric that should really be taken with a grain of salt as it depends on how lucky you are with the silicon lottery the best PCB design vrm and cooling means absolutely nothing if you pair it with poor quality silicon anyway let's get into it and first up I wanted to see how hot the gaming Zed was out of the box so I fired up f1 2018 and run on a loop for an hour however after about 20 minutes in the test it seemed to have just about peaked hovering between 72 and 73 degrees and then after the hour tested held at 73 degrees so a decent result with an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees the temperatures all the more impressive given how quiet the card ran now my room has a noise floor of 38 decibels so it's not super duper quiet and apparently the gaming Z was quieter than that as I was unable to measure a difference with it running at full steam immediately I don't have the best setup for accurately measuring these quieter graphics cards but I can tell you it is very quiet you might have noticed that in the f1 2018 footage at the core held steady at 1950 megahertz and this was the typical operating frequency seen across a number of titles that said in other titles at times it did spike up as high as 1980 megahertz and I did drop as low as eighteen hundred and seventy megahertz for brief periods of time but for the most part it did run at around nineteen hundred and fifty megahertz as a side note under the exact same conditions gigabytes gaming OC Pro fluctuated between 1935 and 1950 megahertz so not quite as solid as the msi model in that regard but very close as for the GDD i6 memory I measured a peak surface temperature of 71 degrees using k-type thermocouple z' while the vrm power stage is picked at 81 degrees again this is with the 21 degree ambient air temperature both series of components are again cooled via very small heat spreaders so it's unsurprising that temperatures are quite high but they are still within spec now moving on to some gaming benchmarks we see here that when playing shut off the Tomb Raider it's basically on par with the gigabyte model used for testing previously and this made it 1 to 3 FPS faster than the found Edition model we see much the same with Strange Brigade we're really looking at results that are within the margin of error though it is clear that these AIB models are a little bit faster than nvidias founders edition finally they have Forza horizon 4 and again just a few frames in it the MSI gaming said was solid at least matching the gigabyte gaming OC Pro or beating it by a frame overclocking the MSI RT X 2060 gaming said using MSI Afterburner was a pretty standard affair the card accepted plus 103 for the core and 800 for the memory with the power and temp limits maxed out this resulted in a typical operating frequency of 2040 megahertz for the core and then 1950 megahertz for the memory though MSI report the DDR speed as 7008 and one megahertz then we saw the GPU max out at 70 degrees which was actually a three degree drop from the out-of-the-box temp as the fans are now spending quite a bit faster the Kippur temperatures under control overall a solid overclock and this is about the best you can expect to see from an RT X 2060 and just lastly wrapping up the testing I have some quick power consumption numbers this is total system consumption and we're testing with the standard GPU test rig which uses a car I know 1900 K clocked at 5 gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 memory the MSI gaming Zed consumes around 20 watts or less than the gigabyte gaming OC pro model which is a reasonable out-of-the-box power saving for whatever reason gigabyte always seems to be very aggressive with their voltage profiles and we're seeing that again here still pretty typical power consumption for the MSI R model so everything checks out here overall the MSI r-tx 2060 gaming z6g it's a nice graphics card albeit a bit unusual in terms of dimensions the short fat profile for a lack of a better term doesn't doesn't really make a huge amount of sense unless of course I'm missing something there's some sort of scenario where it does make sense but yeah I don't think it makes sense for a lot of things if you had a mini ITX system for example which this probably wouldn't fit in it anyway because it is a triple slot card you would just buy while you'd buy a mini ITX version wouldn't you but if you needed a really compact graphics card you wouldn't you wouldn't buy this so for most situations yeah I don't see it being worthwhile a most situations would see gamers using a standard ATX case or maybe even a micro ATX case but even so for a micro ATX case this isn't really a huge benefit over the other high-end RTF 220 60 cards out there so peculiar point is MSI's sacrified a little bit of cooling performance here and for the same money as Susan G about offer bigger models with longer heat sinks featuring triple fan arrangements another issue is the fact that the GDD are 6 and veeram components aren't cooled by the main heatsink as they are with the Assuan gigabyte models so this will likely mean higher temperatures for these components though I will confirm that soon in my upcoming a seuss ROG Strix RT X 2060 OC gaming review for now though it's fair to say the gaming said certainly isn't bad it is likely in a bit of a disadvantage when compared to the soos ROG Strix or gigabyte gaming Pro OC models and I'm not sure what advantage of any of the squatty format offers remember whereas gigabytes card only occupies two slots this shorter MSI model takes up three so like I said it's a bit of a fatty anyway form factor aside it did run relatively cool and it was very quiet which is most important the car also looks great and the color neutral theme means that will suit any and all builds very well overall a solid offering but at $390 us it may not prove to be the best choice and that is going to do it for this one if you enjoy the video be sure to hit the like button subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the work with your horror books then consider supporting us on patreon don't know why I'm waving this around so much anyway as usual thanks for watching I'm your host Dave see you next time