MSI RTX 2060 Gaming Z 6G Review

1. Introduction2. MSI RTX 2060 Gaming Z 6G3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. 3DMark Port Royal (1440p DXR)6. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. Far Cry 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Battlefield V w/ DXR (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. Final Fantasy XV w/ DLSS (4K)13. Clock Speed14. Temperatures15. Acoustics16. Power Consumption17. Overclocking: 3DMark and Games18. Overclocking: Thermals, Acoustics, Power19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

With RTX 2060 now out in the wild, we continue our look at the custom cards manufactured by Nvidia's partners. Today we turn to MSI and its RTX 2060 Gaming Z model – a factory overclocked card with a boost clock of 1830MHz, we can expect the Gaming Z to outperform Nvidia's Founders Edition by a decent margin. The question is whether or not this extra performance is worth a £70 price premium over the Founders Edition – so let's find out.

On top of the increased out of the box frequency, the RTX 2060 Gaming Z 6G also sports MSI's 7th generation Twin Frozr cooler, a brushed metal backplate, as well as some obligatory RGB lighting. It's perhaps not as over the top as something like the ASUS ROG RTX 2060 Strix OC we reviewed previously, but then again it is also £50 cheaper and still comes factory overclocked. Let's see just how good this card really is.

GPU	RTX 2080 (FE)	GTX 1080	RTX 2070 (FE)	GTX 1070	RTX 2060 (FE)	GTX 1060
SMs	46	20	36	15	30	10
CUDA Cores	2944	2560	2304	1920	1920	1280
Tensor Cores	368	N/A	288	N/A	240	N/A
Tensor FLOPS	85	N/A	63	N/A	51.6	N/A
RT Cores	46	N/A	36	N/A	30	N/A
Texture Units	184	160	144	120	120	80
ROPs	64	64	64	64	48	48
Rays Cast	8 Giga Rays/sec	0.877 Giga Rays/sec	6 Giga Rays/sec	0.65 Giga Rays/sec	5 Giga Rays/sec	0.44 Giga Rays/sec
RTX Performance	60 Trillion RTX-OPS	8.9 Trillion RTX-OPS	45 Trillion RTX-OPS	6.5 Trillion RTX-OPS	37 Trillion RTX-OPS	N/A
GPU Boost Clock	1800 MHz	1733 MHz	1710 MHz	1683 MHz	1680 MHz	1708 MHz
Memory Data Rate	14 Gbps	10 Gbps	14 Gbps	8 Gbps	14 Gbps	8 Gbps
Total Video Memory	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR5X	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR5	6GB GDDR6	6GB GDRR5
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	192-bit
Memory Bandwidth	448 GB/sec	320 GB/sec	448 GB/sec	256 GB/sec	336.1 GB/sec	192 GB/sec
TDP	225W	180W	185W	150W	160W	120W

Unlike the other cards in the RTX 20-series,  Nvidia's RTX 2060 Founders Edition is not a factory overclocked model – so the 1680MHz boost clock from that card is in fact reference speed. That means MSI's Gaming Z, with its default boost clock of 1830MHz, is essentially a factory overclock of +150MHz from reference. We can still expect this card to run faster than that in the real world, thanks to GPU Boost, but we will get to that later in the review.

The GDDR6 memory speeds have been left at stock, though, meaning a frequency of 1750MHz, giving 14000 MHz (effective) speeds.

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