Gigabyte RTX 2060 Gaming OC Graphics Card Review

Gigabyte RTX 2060 Gaming OC Pro The new RTX graphics cards have been with us for a little while now. Which has given us time to test out a fair few cards from Gigabyte. From the mighty Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme, one of the most affordable RTX 2080's, or the properly fantastic GTX 1660 that launched this week for about £200. It seems then, Gigabyte has something for everyone and every budget. If you're looking to get into some RTX action though, the entry point for that is the RTX 2060 series. At just £369.99, the Gaming OC Pro from Gigabyte is one of the most affordable RTX cards around. However, looking at the specifications, it's hard to work out why. It's heavily overclocked, has a triple-fan cooler, backplate, RGB, and more. So, let's jump in for a closer look and see what else it has to offer! Features Powered by GeForce RTX™ 2060Integrated with 6GB GDDR6 192-bit memory interfaceWINDFORCE 3X Cooling System with alternate spinning fansRGB Fusion 2.0 – synchronize with other AORUS devicesMetal Back Plate 1830 MHz Core Clock Vs (Reference card: 1680 MHz) Specifications For in-depth specifications, please visit the official Gigabyte page here. What Gigabyte Had to Say "The GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming OC Pro is powered by the new NVIDIA Turing GPU design and the innovative RTX platform, RTX graphics cards combine real-time ray tracing, artificial intelligence, and programmable shading. With GPU boost clock of 1830 MHz the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming OC Pro guarantees an outstanding gaming performance. Keep things cool with GIGABYTE's cooling system which includes a 3D Active Fan and Direct Touch Heatpipes to make sure you get the best performance out of your graphics card. Another feature is the new airflow system to the RTX 2060 where the card's fans have alternating rotations which increases airflow out of the card and improves cooling temperatures." Packaging The Gigabyte packaging hasn't changed much over the years, but that's hardly a bad thing. This is immediately recognisable as one of theirs. It still has that funky graphic on the front and everything. More importantly, we can see on the bottom left, that it's the Gaming OC Pro 6GB Edition. Furthermore, details of the RGB Fusion 2.0 support, Windforce cooler, Ray Tracing, etc. Around the back, there is a wealth of information too. Most important is the Windforce 3X cooling system, a tried and well tested cooler for Gigabyte that's been kicking around for years now. It uses 3 x 80mm fans for great cooling performance. A Closer Look In all honesty, this is about as bland as graphics cards get from Gigabyte. I mean that in a nice way though, but it looks just like many other models that came before it. Their 10-series cards looked like this. They even make a 2080 Ti that looks identical. It's likely part of the process that allows them to keep the cost down. However, despite that, we know this is a competent cooler, so if it isn't broken, why fix it! The triple fan configuration works great though. It has a zero RPM mode for silent running at low load. The outer fans spin anti-clockwise, while the middle spins clockwise. This creates a huge air vortex that moves the air around the heatsink much more efficiently. On the back, you'll find a full-size backplate, with just some simple "Gigabyte" branding in the middle. It'll keep the card straight, but also helps cool the PCB too. Down the side, you'll find a simple Gigabyte logo too. Well, almost-simple at least, as it comes with 16.7M colour RGB lighting effects. Nothing too gaudy, just a simple lit logo on this card. Around the back, you'll find three Display Port and a single HDMI port. Again, nothing crazy, but more than enough to meet demands at this price range. Finally, we have the power input, which is a single 8-pin header. How We Test We continue to update our testing methods around once per year. As such, we re-test older hardware to reflect changes over time. These can be driver updates, Windows updates, game patches, and more; all of which have an impact on performance figures. Furthermore, we update our test bench to newer and more relevant hardware. This means that our new reviews aren’t always comparable to those of older reviews, so please compare the testing methodology on older reviews should you be trying to compare them with newer ones. Replicate Our Results When it comes to our benchmarks in our reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory and kept as simple as possible, although there are a few exceptions. Remember that your choice of graphics card, CPU, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there’s always a margin for error when using any software. Links are provided below, as well as the settings we use. We encourage you to not just look at how one product compares to any other, but how it compares to your own. If you’re looking to build a new system, you should benchmark your current PC using the benchmarks available to you. You should then look at the percentage improvement from your current hardware to the hardware tested here to give you a ballpark figure of how much of an upgrade this will provide you with. Graphics Card Test System Motherboard – Aorus Z390 Gaming MasterProcessor – Intel Core i9-9900K (Stock)RAM – Crucial Ballistix Gaming 32GB (4 x 8GB) 3000 MHzCPU Cooler – Noctua NH-D15SPower Supply – Be Quiet Power Zone 1000WMain Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GBChassis – Thermaltake Core P5 TGOperating System – Windows 10 64-bitMonitor – AOC 28-Inch 4K Gaming Monitor Additional Hardware Killawatt style electricity usage meter wall plugPrecision Gold N05CC Decibel meter Gaming To gauge performance levels which are easily reproduced time after time, by both ourselves and our readers, we now stick strictly to games default profiles. With our previous reviews, we used the “Medium or Normal” preset. However, as GPUs get faster, we’ve now moved that up to “High” profiles for all games, at all resolutions. V-Sync is always disabled in our testing, as is FreeSync and G-Sync technologies or similar. Graphics card power usage set to optimised or balance, and the system power mode set to High Performance within Windows and the available GPU driver software. Identical settings are used for all resolutions unless otherwise stated. Games and Settings Used Shadow of the Tomb Raider DX12 High Preset1080p1440p2160pDeus Ex: Mankind Divided DX12 High Preset1080p1440p2160pGhost Recon: Wildlands High Preset1080p1440p2160pBattlefield V DX12 High Preset1080p1440p2160pBattlefield V DX12 High Preset (DXR Enabled) NVIDIA RTX Cards ONLY1080p1440p2160pMetro Exodus DX12 High Preset1080p1440p2160pMetro Exodus DX12 High Preset (RT, then RT and DLSS Enabled) NVIDIA RTX Cards ONLY1080p1440p2160pFar Cry New Dawn High Preset DX121080p1440p2160p The Division 2 High Preset DX121080p1440p2160p Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download)FireStrike Ultra BenchmarkUnigine Superposition (download)4K Optimised BenchmarkHWMonitor (download)GPU-Z Noise Everyone has a reasonable noise level preference when it comes to comes to components on a computer. Some can handle all fans at 100% load to keep temperatures down; some want an entirely silent computer. To accurately gauge the noise output of a graphics card, we position a Precision Gold N05CC one meter above our open-air test bench and take an average reading at idle and load. Gaming noise levels are taken during a CPU vs CPU match a preset match in Soul Calibur VI. Power Consumption We take power readings during idle state with no background applications running. Then again at 50% completion of the Unigine Superposition benchmark, using the average as the final published result. Gaming power consumption is taken during a CPU vs CPU match a preset match in Soul Calibur VI. Temperatures We take temperature readings after 10 minutes of desktop idle with no background programs running, then take the recorded maximum delivered from Unigine Superposition after a 4K optimised run, confirming the numbers are accurate with HWMonitor. Furthermore, the ambient temperature is always kept +/- 1c from 21c. Gaming temperatures are taken during a CPU vs CPU match a preset match in Soul Calibur VI. Synthetic Benchmarks This card isn't designed to topple titans, but it's still a punchy card in its own right. Being the low-end of the RTX series still puts it way ahead of the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti though. What is interesting is that in TimeSpy, it beat out the GTX 1080, but when we got to Unigine, it wasn't even as quick as the 1660 Ti. I think it's safe to say, these results are all over the place. So, let's get to the gaming test and see if things are a bit more orderly there! 3DMark FireStrike 3DMark TimeSpy Unigine Superposition Shadow of the Tomb Raider Straight away, we're seeing some pretty solid performance from this card. Pushing up to 116 FPS at 1080 and 79 FPS at 1440p is no bad thing. We run "High" settings across the board remember, so there's obviously headroom to up those to mostly Ultra here. Or you could benefit from the higher refresh rates if you're using a 144 Hz or similar monitor. 4K was sitting around 44 FPS, which is fine with V-Sync on for single-player gaming. However, 4K Medium would benefit framerates much better. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided While always a bit more demanding to run than most, Deus Ex still delivered good results too. Almost 100 FPS at 1080p, and 66.9 FPS at 1440p are very much playable. 4K fell off a cliff though, hitting just 34.9, but even the mighty 2080 Ti was the only card to bust 60 FPS on this anyway. Ghost Recon: Wildlands We see pretty much the same thing happening with Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Over 100 FPS at 1080p, and almost 80 FPS at 1440p. Great news for those with high refresh-rate displays. 4K dropped to 44.5 FPS, but take that down to medium and it'll 4K all day long at 60 FPS. Battlefield V I could have guessed these framerates at this point, with 97 FPS at 1080p and 75 FPS at 1440p. Of course, we're using the High profile, but with those figures, you could increase the profile to Ultra with little concern for performance. 4K is still a big ask though, although it's unlikely many would but this card for 4K gaming, of course. Metro Exodus All hail the GPU slayer that is Metro. This games High is visually more impressive and more demanding than most games Extreme settings. However, 67.1 FPS for 1080p and 50.4 FPS at 1440p are very playable. Far Cry New Dawn One of our recent benchmark additions is Far Cry New Dawn. Not only does this game look fantastic, but at 110 FPS at 1080p, it's a breeze to run. 89 FPS at 1440p is silky smooth. It's even pretty playable at 4K with 46 FPS, although again I'd rather use the Medium profile for 4K to get that closer to 60 FPS. The Division 2 This weeks biggest game release is also new to our benchmark setup. This game is one of the best optimised PC games in ages too. Of course, it's no surprise that we're seeing 110 FPS, 89 FPS and 46 FPS throughout the three big resolutions here too. Ray Tracing and DLSS A key selling point of RTX is the addition of Ray Tracing and DLSS. This isn't the best card for either, if I'm honest. However, we got 40 FPS at 1080p with DXR enabled. That dropped to 34 FPS at 1440p, although DLSS took that back up to 41 FPS. 4K performance sucked, but that was to be expected. Things were about the same in Metro, with 47.98 FPS at 1080, and 33.44 FPS at 1440p. Again, DLSS at 1440p pushed the framerate up to 41.9, but that's far from ideal. 4K was brutal at 18.87 FPS, and DLSS isn't supported on the RTX 2060 at this resolution either. Power Consumption As you would expect from Nvidia's latest chipset, efficiency is fantastic. Using just 278 Watts, it's pulling much less than even the RX580, which is thrashes in regards to overall performance. Temperatures It also runs pretty cool, but given the size of the cooler is the same as their 2080 Ti model, it didn't have to work hard on the RTX 2060 chipset. Acoustics Overclocking The big cooler on this card does have some advantages though. If it can cool a 2080 Ti, it can make light work of the RTX 2060. This allowed us to push the Boost clock up by 125 MHz, and the memory clock up by a staggering 900 MHz. The end result was a 7.55% increase in power usage. However, that netted greater gains in performance, with 15 FPS more in Tomb Raider, and almost 10% improvement in the 3DMark score. How Much Does It Cost? Right now, the Gigabyte RTX 2060 Gaming OC Pro 6GB Graphics Card is available from Amazon for around £359.99. However, I have seen that price sit around the £350 area with some retailers and listings, so be sure to shop around. That's cheaper than the last-gen GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 right now, which it comfortably beats in most tests. Gamers in the US can find it on Amazon.com here. Overview There's little that's surprising about this card, and while that sounds like a bad thing, it's really not. It's exactly how I expected it to look, and it performed as well as I expected. No new world records here, but given this is the more affordable and modest "Gigabyte" card, that's fine with me. For something more "Xtreme" Gigabyte have their flagship Aorus gaming range. Despite that though, it managed to go toe-to-toe with the more "premium" ASUS STRIX RTX 2060, which is impressive. More Hz When it comes down to it, this card just blows through every game at 1080p. It's easy stuff for something of this price range. If you're gaming at 60 Hz then it's maybe even too powerful for what you need. However, if you're rocking a 144 Hz monitor, then it couldn't be better suited for the job. More Pixels For 1440p, it made easy work of just about everything there too. Scoring around 80 FPS at 1440p with High settings is very respectable and right on the money for what the GPU costs too. This is where this GPU is best suited I think. For those wanting 4K, I'd suggest saving up a while longer for their RTX 2070 series though, as the 2060 just isn't built for it. Should I Buy One? The RTX 2060 was designed to deliver amazing framerates at 1080p and 1440p. From eSports and high-refresh-rate displays, to high resolution, high-fidelity single player experiences. It certainly delivers on that, and Gigabyte have a competitive mid-budget gaming card here for the enthusiast PC gamer that doesn't want to break the bank, but still wants to max out the latest games.