EVGA is Shipping Some 2060 KO’s with ‘Defective’ TU104 Chips

At CES 2020, EVGA gave us something of a surprise when they revealed the upcoming release of a new Nvidia 2060 graphics card. Namely, the GeForce RTX 2060 KO.

This was interpreted at the time as being a semi-response to the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT. A factor that was all but confirmed when (at least on launch) the 2060 KO was price-matching Team Red’s card. It seems, however, that there may have been another reason for this graphics card creation.

In a report via Videocardz, it has been found that a number of EVGA 2060 KO’s are actually utilizing a TU104 chipset. This, rather than the standard TU106 used for (at least to my knowledge) all other 2060s.

EVGA 2060 KO

In the image above, which reportedly came from a review sample, you can clearly see that a Turing 104-150 chip has been used. Now, considering that this chip is more predominantly used in 2070/2080 graphics cards, you might be wondering why.

Well, the general consensus is that these chips used may be ‘defective’. Now, this doesn’t mean that they don’t work. Rather, that they didn’t quite meet the required specifications of those higher-tier graphics cards. Whether this means broken CUDA clusters, TMUs or ROPs, etc. there is a happy bonus to this. You see, the Nvidia 2060 only requires around 60% of the Cuda clusters from the TU104 chip. As such, and as crazy as it might sound, this ‘defective’ version may be the more preferable one to have.

Even Nvidia has gone as far as to say:

“GeForce RTX 2060 boards are based on either the TU106 or TU104 GPUs. The performance difference between the two configurations is negligible in most cases. Although TU104-based GeForce RTX 2060 cards will deliver higher performance in Blender.”

What Do We Think?

In a nutshell, this appears to be an economical cost-cutting decision of Nvidia and EVGA to off-load some GPU chips that would’ve otherwise been redundant. The weird payoff, however, is that this may have resulted in a number of better EVGA 2060 KO’s.

It does, however, (looking at this from an alternative perspective) perhaps highlight just how ‘slap-dash’ the EVGA 2060 KO was. Then again, it’s another graphics card on the market to consider as your next upgrade and, who knows, it might be better than what it says on the box!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!