Best RTX 2060 graphics card 2024 – GPU Buying Guide

How will these cards perform?

One of the questions you’re probably asking yourself at this stage is how well do these cards perform on both a gaming level and a work level. Well firstly, be aware that these graphics cards will be able to smash about every work task you throw at them. When referencing work you really need to be concentrating on the CPU and RAM and make sure they are up to scratch.

Having said that, when you’re referencing gaming, the GPU will have a massive impact on the overall performance. Nvidia boasts about the potential for up to 6x the performance levels of previous generations, which for now we’ll take with a pinch of salt but if claims are true is a huge step forward in technological advancements.

The great thing about these cards is their affordability. Now I know $400 dollars is a lot of money to fork out for one hardware component but we’re talking about TOP level high-end gaming rigs here and $400 is relatively affordable on the large scale of things. Just compare that to something like the RTX 2080Ti which retails at nearly $1300. You’re going to be able to push most games at 1440p with high settings and achieve 60fps or more. Most of the cards above perform similarly but there are subtle differences that we will discuss very shortly before giving our final verdict.

RTX 2060 vs GTX 1070

If you aren’t familiar with the 1070 TI then where have you been the last couple of years? At the time of release, it was Nvidia’s latest HD, VR gaming GPU and successor to the number one GPU by market share, the GTX 1070.

It featured 8GB of GDDR5 memory with a 256-bit interface producing a total memory bandwidth of 256GB/s and a clock speed of 1.68GHz as standard. Geforce has come out and said that the RTX 2060 is a direct competitor to the 1070 TI but with the latest AI-enhanced graphics and real-time ray tracing which will be touched on later.

So how do the new 20 series compare to the 1070 TI? Well on paper they’re extremely close in terms of performance but overall the 1070 TI just edges the RTX 2060. The 1070 TI boasts slightly better 3D speed, texture detail, and complex splatter whereas the 2060 possesses much faster multi-rendering and overall better FPS across a plethora of games.

All this coupled with the fact that the RTX 2060 is 20% cheaper than 1070 gives consumers a real tough decision to make when asking themselves which GPU to go for. However, with the new real-time ray tracing that will be more heavily implemented into games you are definitely future-proofing yourself by going for the 20 series.

Table Key and Terms

• Clock Speed – Clock speed refers to the internal, “core” clock of the graphics processor. The higher the clock speed, the better your performance.
• VRAM – VRAM refers to the “video RAM”, or memory available to the GPU. Discrete GPUs tend to come with their own VRAM– in the 1080’s case, this is GDDR5X VRAM, which is a bit faster than the industry standard GDDR5. The more VRAM you have, the better your card be at handling high resolutions and HD textures.
• Overclock – Overclocking refers to pushing the clock speed of a component higher to get more performance. Usually, this is done by the user, but the cards we’re listing here today all boast “factory overclocks”, which is overclocking done by the manufacturer and proven stable.

How we choose

Since the RTX 2060 is such a powerful card, you really can’t go wrong concerning performance. However, as covered in the intro, there are a lot of companies making their own aftermarket 2060’s, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, so we decided to do the legwork for you and start our search for the best RTX 2060 model.

During this search, we established the following rules to help us narrow down our options:

• The brand must be trustworthy and established
• Reviews should indicate a low rate of failure
• Cards should fit into one of the five categories below

For the categories just mentioned, we chose the most meaningful criteria for distinguishing GPUs, as well as a category balanced between all the others. We’ve listed these below:

• Top Performance – The best out-of-box performance. This corresponds pretty closely to factory overclocks.
• Top All-Rounder – The top all-rounder must do pretty much what it says on the tin. It mustn’t just excel in one area, it must excel across the board and beat out the other competition. The top all-rounder will be powerful, cool, quiet, and affordable.
• Best Budget – The cheapest we could find that was still of respectable build quality from a trusted manufacturer. If you want to pinch pennies, but still get a high-end graphical experience, this is the choice for you.
• Best Balanced – A “balanced” pick, balancing things like performance and cooling to make a good middle-road pick for those who want a well-balanced graphics card.
• Best Small form  – Size isn’t everything, you know (but sometimes the lack of size can be). This is for the smallest cards, making them most-suited for installation into Mini ITX and Micro ATX PC builds.