EVGA's GeForce RTX 2060 KO is available for $300 on Amazon

[Polycount]

In brief: Typically, you have to wait for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or other holiday events to get the best deals on computer hardware. However, if you're looking for a decent budget video card, you can now snag EVGA's RTX 2060 KO for just $300 on Amazon.

This particular 2060 model was announced a while ago in response to AMD's almost identically-priced 5600 XT. Recently, it became available for purchase, meaning the Green and Red Teams are once again competing head-to-head in this price bracket.

As long as this price stays consistent, we'd consider the 2060 KO a pretty good value option for 1080p gaming. Though the updated 5600 XT (with AMD's boosted factory overclock speeds) outperforms it in some scenarios (and vice versa), based on our own benchmarks, the difference is typically not very noticeable.

You might assume, then, that your final decision should come down to personal preference, and that's true to an extent. However, as Steve pointed out in our recent AMD driver discussion piece, if we pit the 5600 XT against the RTX 2060 directly -- which we intend to do soon -- we'll have a tough time recommending the Red Team's contender, even if the performance difference between the two is minor.

Why? Well, through our own research and discussions with users, it's become clear that AMD's drivers have some pretty serious problems, and they've been present in some capacity since the launch of the earliest Navi cards seven months ago. We've seen widespread reports of driver crashes, black screen bugs, and flickering issues, to name a few.

AMD is doing its best to fix these problems, but we have no idea when complete patches will arrive. Until then, it might be best to go with the (for now) more stable Turing cards if 1080p gaming is your primary focus.

We're not saying RTX GPUs don't have issues -- occasional driver bugs are, and probably always will be a problem on both sides of the aisle -- but our own polling seems to suggest that they're currently less frequent and less severe among the latest Green Team GPUs.

If a $300 RTX 2060 does sound like your cup of tea, you can snag the 6GB EVGA KO model on Amazon right now. It comes with a "real boost clock" of 1680 MHz, and a free copy of Deliver Us The Moon, an RTX-enabled sci-fi adventure title. If AMD's driver problems don't scare you, multiple RX 5600 XT models can be found for $300 or less.

Masthead credit: Shutterstock

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https://www.techspot.com/news/84067-evga-geforce-rtx-2060-ko-available-300-amazon.html

 

[Evernessince]

Statement retracted as it has been addressed by the author. Read below for additional info.

 

[Ravalo]

"that's been the case since the launch of the earliest Navi cards seven months ago. We've seen widespread reports of driver crashes, black screen bugs, and flickering issues, to name a few."

Wrong. A majority of the recent issues you are seeing started with the 2020 drivers. It's no coincidence that Steve reported about this just recently.

I actually had the black screen issue since I got my pc (very early 2020) even before updating the drivers to adrenalin 2020 (it had somewhat early navi drivers)

 

[Evernessince]

I actually had the black screen issue since I got my pc (very early 2020) even before updating the drivers to adrenalin 2020 (it had somewhat early navi drivers)

ehm

"A majority of the recent issues you are seeing started with the 2020 drivers "

 

[psycros]

"that's been the case since the launch of the earliest Navi cards seven months ago. We've seen widespread reports of driver crashes, black screen bugs, and flickering issues, to name a few."

Wrong. A majority of the recent issues you are seeing started with the 2020 drivers. It's no coincidence that Steve reported about this just recently.

Who are you trying to convince, yourself? Five minutes of searching shows these complaints date back to November at least. I'll never understand brand worshippers.

 

[Evernessince]

Who are you trying to convince, yourself? Five minutes of searching shows these complaints date back to October at least. I'll never understand brand worshippers.

This is less evidence and more opinionated observation. I can find black screen posts for Nvidia cards dating to the start of the Nvidia forum. It's an issue that has been around for a long time. We aren't discussing the existence of issues here, we are discussing the frequency / volume.

 

[Polycount]

ehm

"A majority of the recent issues you are seeing started with the 2020 drivers "

quantifiers matter.

As psycros pointed out, these issues have been reported for quite a while. It's unfortunate and I'm not an AMD hater by any means (I am an Nvidia customer, but the second AMD releases a high-end competitor, I'll gladly switch teams if it provides better performance), but it is the reality of the situation as it stands.

With that said, you may be right about the "majority" thing. I'll look into it, and check out a few forums and Reddit threads to see how common the problems were in October vs today. I was mostly taking Steve at his word here -- he's the one who ran the HUB poll and gathered the majority of this information.

EDIT: By the way, I adjusted the wording of the statement in the meantime, hopefully to be less misleading (until I can look into it further, that is). Let me know if you have any thoughts or think I could tweak it further.

 

[psycros]

From what I know Nvidia has dropped the ball plenty of times in the driver department. I've been an ATI die-hard since the Radeon 7800 days but I've owned a couple Nvidias as well. Several times I had 600, 700 or 900 series cards refuse to support the native resolution of a monitor. The thing is, at least their drivers would actually finish an install without freaking out. Out of probably 150 attempts to install AMD's drivers with four different GPU lines and at least as many different PCs over the past ten years, I've had it go off without a hitch maybe three times. One of those was with my RX 580 the first time I installed it. Since then no updates have successfully completed regardless of whether I used the AMD driver cleaner first or not. In fact I can't even reinstall the driver version I originally installed without error - I have to restore from a recent partition image instead. Its been the same on both Window 7 and 10 with two different motherboards - one AMD and the other Intel. In my book that's a record of failure by any measure, at least in software. I love AMD because of the better value and superior colors but they make it so hard to stay faithful. And seeing IE pop up every time I look at the error reports is a massive facepalm.

 

[Adi6293]

Who are you trying to convince, yourself? Five minutes of searching shows these complaints date back to November at least. I'll never understand brand worshippers.

My black screen started with December update but I went back to October's drivers and its all good : - )

 

[Danny101]

Unless there's some critical reason to do so, I generally wait up to 6 months before I upgrade the drivers. Along with that, Microsoft has forced me to hold back on OS upgrades as well. I wonder with all the complaints on video driver issues, has anyone even considered Microsoft's role in the process?

 

[Evernessince]

From what I know Nvidia has dropped the ball plenty of times in the driver department. I've been an ATI die-hard since the Radeon 7800 days but I've owned a couple Nvidias as well. Several times I had 600, 700 or 900 series cards refuse to support the native resolution of a monitor. The thing is, at least their drivers would actually finish an install without freaking out. Out of probably 150 attempts to install AMD's drivers with four different GPU lines and at least as many different PCs over the past ten years, I've had it go off without a hitch maybe three times. One of those was with my RX 580 the first time I installed it. Since then no updates have successfully completed regardless of whether I used the AMD driver cleaner first or not. In fact I can't even reinstall the driver version I originally installed without error - I have to restore from a recent partition image instead. Its been the same on both Window 7 and 10 with two different motherboards - one AMD and the other Intel. In my book that's a record of failure by any measure, at least in software. I love AMD because of the better value and superior colors but they make it so hard to stay faithful. And seeing IE pop up every time I look at the error reports is a massive facepalm.

ATi was pretty uneven with drivers. It wasn't even until the 300 series (AMD at the time) that I'd say they started improving things. The 400 and 500 series (polaris) were pretty good and unfortunately with Navi and this recent development they've taken a step back again. The launch wasn't the best and I don't know how they managed to make things worse with the 2020 drivers.

It's disappointing and now I'd have to say Nvidia has the better drivers. Somehow AMD managed to make drivers worse over time recently and that's a shame.

As psycros pointed out, these issues have been reported for quite a while. It's unfortunate and I'm not an AMD hater by any means (I am an Nvidia customer, but the second AMD releases a high-end competitor, I'll gladly switch teams if it provides better performance), but it is the reality of the situation as it stands.

With that said, you may be right about the "majority" thing. I'll look into it, and check out a few forums and Reddit threads to see how common the problems were in October vs today. I was mostly taking Steve at his word here -- he's the one who ran the HUB poll and gathered the majority of this information.

EDIT: By the way, I adjusted the wording of the statement in the meantime, hopefully to be less misleading (until I can look into it further, that is). Let me know if you have any thoughts or think I could tweak it further.

ty! I edited my original post to reflect this.

 

[Rayneofpayne]

Meh can they please just announce 3000 series already, 7nm UVL plz everything else is a paultry waste of time.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

If I was building an entry desktop for gaming, I’d take this or a Super over the XT for sure.

 

[krizby]

Looking back I found lots of similarities in Nvidia vs AMD and Apple vs Android
Nvidia - Apple: locked down both in hardware and softwares but run extremely stable, overpriced.
AMD - Android: customizable, highly tweak able but can be unstable, fair priced.
Recently my Samsung S10 exhibited weird behavior like screen unresponsive for 10s after wake up, this lasted for 2 months before being fixed with the latest OTA update. This annoyed the crap outta me and made me reconsider Samsung for the next purchase (had S8 and S9 before).
All in all experiences like this can leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth, practically make people decide to switch brand. This is happening to a lot of AMD users, while Nvidia or Apple users have little reason switch brand.
Almost all Iphone users will buy anther Iphone

 

[amghwk]

Black screen? What black screen? I've yet to see them in the games that I play with my 5700XT. The latest game I am trying now is Wolcen @ 4K.

Please someone tell me how to reproduce it in my 8700K based system. I really would like to know why so many keep posting this "amd driver sucks" meme. If the offending game is in my library I will try it.

 

[Prv8J0k3r]

Black screen? What black screen? I've yet to see them in the games that I play with my 5700XT. The latest game I am trying now is Wolcen @ 4K.

Please someone tell me how to reproduce it in my 8700K based system. I really would like to know why so many keep posting this "amd driver sucks" meme. If the offending game is in my library I will try it.

I keep hearing this also, but I've had no issues either. I play a ridiculous amount of games and they are always maxed out on settings and I can't remember the last time I had a black or blue screen. Not saying people aren't having issues just saying I'm personally not.

 

[Starter24]

I'm using my Rx 580 4gb on 1080p max settings on most games and dont have a problem. The card is like $120 but this new Nvidia 2060 ko is $300 and does 1080p too? Hmm. Yea the Nvidia may have a possible 20 fps advantage but price comparison is there

 

[Evernessince]

Black screen? What black screen? I've yet to see them in the games that I play with my 5700XT. The latest game I am trying now is Wolcen @ 4K.

Please someone tell me how to reproduce it in my 8700K based system. I really would like to know why so many keep posting this "amd driver sucks" meme. If the offending game is in my library I will try it.

I keep hearing this also, but I've had no issues either. I play a ridiculous amount of games and they are always maxed out on settings and I can't remember the last time I had a black or blue screen. Not saying people aren't having issues just saying I'm personally not.

The problem is no one has been able to reproduce it. Even the people at the RMA centers are getting the cards back and they are working fine in test systems.

We also don't have any hard numbers on how many people are experiencing the issue.

It makes it's very hard to verify and even harder to fix.

 

[Karl Hungus]

The problem is no one has been able to reproduce it. Even the people at the RMA centers are getting the cards back and they are working fine in test systems.

We also don't have any hard numbers on how many people are experiencing the issue.

It makes it's very hard to verify and even harder to fix.

From the reviews I read on Newegg and Amazon, at least some of the issues are related to overheating. We all know the issues AMD has had with 'hot' cards (I.e. the 5XX series). With the 5700 cards, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI have had to fix them because of the thermal pads or faulty 'screw-tightening', and there have also been problems with fan curves out of the box. The average user isn't going to mess with trying to fix their card (nor would I...why, when Nvidia cards just work) so they send them back, likely never to buy another AMD card. As I've said, it would be really nice if AMD would fix their issues so that we all benefit from the competition.

 

[Evernessince]

From the reviews I read on Newegg and Amazon, at least some of the issues are related to overheating. We all know the issues AMD has had with 'hot' cards (I.e. the 5XX series). With the 5700 cards, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI have had to fix them because of the thermal pads or faulty 'screw-tightening', and there have also been problems with fan curves out of the box. The average user isn't going to mess with trying to fix their card (nor would I...why, when Nvidia cards just work) so they send them back, likely never to buy another AMD card. As I've said, it would be really nice if AMD would fix their issues so that we all benefit from the competition.

Overheating issues are a separate thing unrelated to the issues refereed to the article.. That said, Navi is almost as power efficient as Turing. If there are overheating issues that is more likely due to the AIB, not AMD.

 

[ubronan]

Often its not actually the gpu driver itself messing up.
But more likely the combination between drivers, in my experience currently only 43 years in IT, one of the most famous culpritt is that failing of the shared irq setting.
I know people start blabbing that it has been resolved, the truth is far from being resolved.
If you have a machine packed with hardware you often see these problems occur.
I actually see them more often than I like it myself, yes even the ones build today.
The most likely culprit is often the (realtek) audio driver however solving these issues is a pain since the simple setting forced irq these days is no longer possible, your totally have to rely on the the motherboard and os to solve it. Which actually often does not work very well.
Even though its a blessing for those not technical people, for me its still a great failure that it has disappeared hardware controlled irq was and still is very important.
Because I see more than I like these issues daily and thats only in a medium sized IT environment.
It costs many man hours work time to solve these problems and often ends in removal of the parts and switching parts to solve these issues.

 

[Karl Hungus]

Overheating issues are a separate thing unrelated to the issues refereed to the article.. That said, Navi is almost as power efficient as Turing. If there are overheating issues that is more likely due to the AIB, not AMD.

Yah, as I said it seems to be card-related, but why just AMD cards again? It isn't helping with AMD's image at all and they should be right pissed at the manufacturers if it is on their end.

 

[Evernessince]

Yah, as I said it seems to be card-related, but why just AMD cards again? It isn't helping with AMD's image at all and they should be right pissed at the manufacturers if it is on their end.

It's not just AMD cards. There are RTX models that overheat as well. There have even been articles on it: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/rtx-2080-ti-gpu-defects-launch,37995.html

Gamers Nexus did a video on it:

There are other examples like the Zotac RTX 2060 as well.

AIBs mess up.

 

[Karl Hungus]

It's not just AMD cards. There are RTX models that overheat as well. There have even been articles on it:
There are other examples like the Zotac RTX 2060 as well.

AIBs mess up.

No doubt it happens, but I don't see a string of negative reviews on Newegg/Amazon for the RTX cards like I do for almost every single 5700XT on there.

 

[Evernessince]

No doubt it happens, but I don't see a string of negative reviews on Newegg/Amazon for the RTX cards like I do for almost every single 5700XT on there.

Most RX 5700 XTs have 4 to 4.5 stars. There are more RTX 2080 Ti's with 3 star reviews. If there is a string of bad reviews it's likely an isolated incident due to specific models. You can not attribute that to overheating on the whole.