EVGA are shipping some RTX 2060 KO cards with Turing TU104 GPUs

EVGA unveiled the RTX 2060 KO card at CES earlier this month with a price tag of just $279 USD. The card can be purchased currently for $299 which is now the official MSRP that Nvidia has marked its RTX 2060 series down to.

The regular RTX 2060 cards are usually equipped with Nvidia Turing TU106 GPU dies, however, in some cases the EVGA RTX 2060 KO is different, as it can be shipped with a Turing TU104-150 die which is typically found in Nvidia RTX 2070/2080 cards. It is believed that the reason for this is to make the RTX 2060 KO more cost-effective to produce for both EVGA and Nvidia.

Turing TU104 GPUs found in certain EVGA RTX 2060 KO cards are most likely to be defective dies with lower quality silicon that could not meet the specifications of RTX 2070/2080 graphics cards. The RTX 2060 requires considerably less CUDA cores compared to RTX 2070 and 2080, so instead of the defective dies being wasted, they are used in the EVGA RTX 2060 KO.

According to a recent discovery by GamersNexus, the Turing TU104 equipped EVGA RTX 2060 KO may be providing a little more performance than RTX 2060 cards with TU106 GPU dies in very specific scenarios such as Blender testing. GamersNexus has since reached out to Nvidia about their findings and the manufacturer did, in fact, confirm that some TU104 equipped RTX 2060’s are more powerful than TU106 cards in Blender.

“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.”

However, not all EVGA RTX 2060 KO cards will have the TU104 dies, the company will simply use what is available at the time, so it will be down to luck if you get one with a TU104 installed. A recent review of the EVGA RTX 2060 KO by TechPowerUp also found that their review sample EVGA 2060 KO was a TU104 equipped card, so they could be more common than you might think.

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KitGuru says: this is an interesting piece of information found by GamersNexus and TechPowerUp, although it's not uncommon for Nvidia to use different GPU cores inside the same series of GPU. They have done this before with manufacturers such as Colorful, it is simply a cost-effective solution for cards which don’t need to 100% comply to reference card specifications.

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