News Last-Gen RTX 2060 Is Nvidia's Best GPU Value Right Now

[Admin]

For less than $230, you get ray tracing and strong 1080p gaming.

Last-Gen RTX 2060 Is Nvidia's Best GPU Value Right Now : Read more

 

[logainofhades]

I still have my 2060 KO Ultra, in my second rig. It's been a great little card.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I still have my 2060 KO Ultra, in my second rig. It's been a great little card.

Every time I pull out the 2060 for testing purposes, I can't help but like the value proposition it offered. $300 in early 2020 was a great buy, and now it's back and lower than ever... at least until inventories clear out.

 

[logainofhades]

Yea, as soon as I can afford a new GPU, it is getting going into my nephew's rig, to replace his aging 970. Will be plenty for what they will use it for. Vanilla minecraft, and WoW.

 

[King_V]

Outside of those stuck with a G-Sync-only monitor, I can't understand why in the low to mid range, anyone would insist on getting a lesser FPS/$ by insisting on Nvidia.

I mean, I generally favor AMD GPUs, and Nvidia's had some irritating issues for me, but I did snap up a GTX 1650 GDDR6 back when I was looking for used RX570 cards. The Nvidia card is slightly slower (edit: a hair slower on the old hierarchy chart, a hair faster on the new chart, I should probably say basically equal), but, new with a full warranty, was worth, after rebate, almost $20 extra over the used RX570 4GB cards I was finding. The lesser power consumption was definitely a bonus.

The point is, at that moment in time, I thought the Nvidia card was offering me the best bang for my buck, so I went with it. When it's not, I go AMD.

 

[logainofhades]

Yea, I have to agree there. I have both AMD and Nvida myself. I couldn't say no to an MSRP RX 6800, when the shortages were in full swing, over a year ago. It was just a bonus that what I play was optimized for AMD.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I'd say that in general, I've had slightly fewer issues over time with Nvidia GPUs compared to AMD GPUs. Pre-RDNA, that was far more heavily weighted in favor of Nvidia, and I had multiple Vega and Polaris boards that failed or were simply flaky. Even now, with RDNA 2, I've had two reviews samples that had stability problems. One, an RX 6750 XT, works fine... until I try to run a ray tracing game. Then it usually crashes within 60 seconds, and sometimes it can't even do that. So in this case at least one chip passed the binning process and now fails for whatever reason. I had an RX 6950 XT fail during testing as well. And while I get far more graphics cards than most people, we're not talking about dozens of samples. Six RX 6x50 cards were sent to me this year, two were bad. I can only hope it was a fluke.

I do appreciate the potential of DLSS. If FSR 2.0 were in as many games, it might not matter quite as much, but DLSS simply looks better and works we'll in my experience. I can tell if it's on at 1080p, even in Quality mode, but at 1440p and 4K I really have to look and even then I might not guess correctly. So when I'm just playing a game like The Ascent or Spider-Man and it has DLSS, I enable it. I'd do the same for FSR 2.0, but most of the games I've actually played don't support that yet.

Gut feeling, for me, I'd probably pay 10% more for an Nvidia card of equal performance compared to AMD. Or if you prefer, I'd give up about 10% in normal performance if that meant getting Nvidia's hardware and software and probably better DXR performance. Some people might say they're basically equal, but I can't say that's my experience. Nvidia GPUs and drivers haven't been flawless, but if I encounter some oddity during testing of a graphics card, it's usually and AMD card nine times out of ten.

 

[dk382]

EVGA has discounted their 6GB 2060 cards to around $200 on their own store a few times now. I think the KO was $205 a couple weeks ago. That's a really good deal that other cards haven't been matching. It's very much worth it if you can snatch one up at that price.

 

[Math Geek]

been looking at the 6600 cards recently and am glad you're conclusion was the same as mine. does seem like the best bang for the buck on the lower end of the pricing scale.

i managed a 3060 at msrp last year as an upgrade but a second system could use something better than the hand me down r9-380 it currently has. and the 6600 looks like the way to go. i just need to read some reviews and see if the $250 models are worth it vs the closer to $300 ones which brings the 6600xt into the conversation......

 

[logainofhades]

At near $300, just go with a 6600xt. Rarely are more expensive cards, of a particular GPU tier, are worth it. Spending a little more over the bottom of the barrel, for better cooling is ok, but when you start creeping up on the pricing of the next tier card, it's a waste of money.

 

[Math Geek]

oh yah i tend to make it complicated. i like cool and quiet and am willing to pay for it. usually the middle of the pack is good enough. especially for a low power card like the 6600. mostly the quiet part is where i might have to spend a touch more as any model should cool fine. my current mini 1650 super at similar power draw is more than ample with the single fan.

but then if i get to the next tier, then i start all over again with "but i'm back at the bottom end of the 6600xt's....."

lol, trust me i know how silly i can get when picking something.

i just need someone to lie to me and tell me the $250 model tested BEST and MOST QUIET. then i'll order it and pretend it's true

 

[dk382]

The sad answer is there is no reliable way to compare every single different model with each other as most reviewers will review just one model and move on. TechPowerUp tends to be a little more comprehensive. They have reviews for five different 6600 XT models, but they only have two reviews for the regular 6600. They reviewed the Powercolor Fighter (2-fan) and the Gigabyte Eagle (3-fan), and the Eagle's stock fan profile ran a little bit louder but was 5 degrees cooler than the Fighter's stock fan profile. Neither are anywhere near the point of thermal throttling (the Fighter had a GPU average of just 70C still).

Basically, with the 6600, I don't think it matters much since it's such a low-power card. It's possible to get a GPU with a really bad cooler, like the Biostar one that Hardware Unboxed looked at, but all the ones available at newegg seem good enough.

 

[logainofhades]

oh yah i tend to make it complicated. i like cool and quiet and am willing to pay for it. usually the middle of the pack is good enough. especially for a low power card like the 6600. mostly the quiet part is where i might have to spend a touch more as any model should cool fine. my current mini 1650 super at similar power draw is more than ample with the single fan.

but then if i get to the next tier, then i start all over again with "but i'm back at the bottom end of the 6600xt's....."

lol, trust me i know how silly i can get when picking something.

i just need someone to lie to me and tell me the $250 model tested BEST and MOST QUIET. then i'll order it and pretend it's true

I have been eyeing the Power Color 6600xt fighter, to replace the 2060 that I mentioned earlier. I have some limitations, on size, due to my ITX case.

 

[RedBear87]

Every time I pull out the 2060 for testing purposes, I can't help but like the value proposition it offered. $300 in early 2020 was a great buy, and now it's back and lower than ever... at least until inventories clear out.

Agreed. It makes me laugh a bit whenever people say that Turing was bad value for money, perhaps it was true at launch, but whoever built a PC in early 2020, just before GPU prices started getting crazy, got a lot of value from the $300 RTX 2060. In my case I built my PC just as we Italians were starting our first lockdown back in March 2020, I was kind of expecting prices to raises so I finally got around ordering all the parts for my 1000€ 1080p PC, since then I've upgraded my 2600X to a 5600X and I mean to upgrade my RAM as well soon enough, but the GPU is one part that I absolutely don't need to touch for 1080p gaming.

 

[nitrium]

I'm still running an original RTX 2060 (6GB). It's fine for most current games on "very high" and often even "ultra" settings for 60 fps at 1080p, but the "RTX" features are utterly useless (turning on ray-tracing anything will see most games dip to under 30 fps, even with DLSS). I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that wants to experience "next-gen" games with ray-tracing.
I might replace it with an RTX 4060 early next year, although if it costs too much vs too little gain compared to what I have now (e.g. like the RTX 3060, which is just 20% faster) , I won't bother.

 

[thisisaname]

Here in the UK the2060 is about the same price as the 3060, with one model being £40 cheaper.

 

[kyzarvs]

If they are going on the UK site, would be great if there was some kind of local update. For example, here Amazon's lowest new 2060 12GB translates to $384, even with the current horror exchange rate (ebuyer $358).

I realise that a website is worldwide - but if you bother to have a .co.uk on the end (or a .au, .nz etc), then a small amount of localisation would be a nice reward for the dollars earned in those territories by the site?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

If they are going on the UK site, would be great if there was some kind of local update. For example, here Amazon's lowest new 2060 12GB translates to $384, even with the current horror exchange rate (ebuyer $358).

I realise that a website is worldwide - but if you bother to have a .co.uk on the end (or a .au, .nz etc), then a small amount of localisation would be a nice reward for the dollars earned in those territories by the site?

We generally write for a US audience and worldwide people get left out on pricing data. Canada, UK, India, Australia, Germany, and Philippines are the next six biggest sources (in that order). Combined, they account for less than half of the US traffic. In fact, you need to add up the traffic from the next 45 countries to equal our US traffic. Plus, if I look to the UK (or Canada or wherever), I suspect the whole premise of this story — that the RTX 2060 is Nvidia's best value GPU right now — may fall apart. It's the best deal in the US because it's priced at just $230, sometimes less. If it costs 50% more than that elsewhere, no one would give it the time of day.

 

[kyzarvs]

We generally write for a US audience and worldwide people get left out on pricing data. Canada, UK, India, Australia, Germany, and Philippines are the next six biggest sources (in that order). Combined, they account for less than half of the US traffic. In fact, you need to add up the traffic from the next 45 countries to equal our US traffic. Plus, if I look to the UK (or Canada or wherever), I suspect the whole premise of this story — that the RTX 2060 is Nvidia's best value GPU right now — may fall apart. It's the best deal in the US because it's priced at just $230, sometimes less. If it costs 50% more than that elsewhere, no one would give it the time of day.

...so don't post it on the region-specific sites is my point.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

...so don't post it on the region-specific sites is my point.

I almost never do anything as region specific. What you're seeing is default behavior for all of Tom's Hardware articles. I could try to restrict it to US-only, but as this isn't a "deal" per se — it's more an observation about the resurgence of RTX 2060, at least locally — there's no reason to lock it to only US viewers.