The new EVGA RTX 2060 KO is… somewhat an RTX 2080

There’s something interesting that happened in the world of GPUs as the EVGA RTX 2060 KO was released recently, it slipped through the cracks as it was – as the name suggested – an RTX 2060 card. But Gamers Nexus did a whole video on this EVGA RTX 2060 KO and discovered that this new card is actually having a different die than any other RTX 2060 cards.

So the thing is, the new EVGA RTX 2060 KO is using a new die that has the codename TU104-150-KC-A1. The importance of the name is within the first phrase – the TU104. So far, other RTX 2060 GPU in the market has the codename TU106.

I highly suggest you watch the video of the EVGA RTX 2060 KO review by Gamers Nexus as they broke down all the numbers and possible reasons why this is happening. It’s quite surprising to see that both EVGA and NVIDIA are caught off-guard here.

In short, here’s what happened – the usual RTX 2080 GPU has the codename of TU104-400A. This new EVGA RTX 2060 KO has a new TU106-150 GPU die. Going by naming scheme alone, the TU104-150 found in the EVGA RTX 2060 KO is technically a variant of the RTX 2080’s GPU.

What’s interesting here is that Gamers Nexus pointed out the main differences of this EVGA RTX 2060 KO compared to other RTX 2060 cards in the market. The main advantage it has is the difference in render times – especially Blender. The new EVGA RTX 2060 KO sees a significant performance increase for both CUDA-only and RT-enabled render tests in Blender.

Then, Gamers Nexus heavily emphasized that the new EVGA RTX 2060 KO does not offer any performance boost in games. The only advantage of buying a graphic card with the TU104-150 GPU is on rendering times – and that’s a big deal for creative work.

There is also no clear indication of which graphic card is using the TU104-150 GPU, but we think that only the EVGA RTX 2060 KO is using this GPU as of now. Gamers Nexus also pointed out that graphic cards using the TU104-150 and the TU106 GPUs will exist side-by-side in the market. There is also no indication of which graphic card is using which GPU.

As for how the TU104-150 GPU exists, we do have some predictions of our own. It seems to be a repurposed die that might be faulty, hence a few parts of the faulty GPU are revalidated and repurposed. This is similar to a certain line of CPUs in the past whereby the highest-end variant that has poorer IMC is rebranded to something else, but we can hit the silicon lottery by having great overclocking headroom for its core clock instead. Perhaps the TU104-150 is conceived out of a similar situation too.

Now, we reviewed both the RTX 2060 Founders Edition, the RTX 2060 Super Founders Edition, and Gigabyte’s RTX 2080 graphic cards before. There is a large performance gap between the RTX 2060 and the RTX 2080. For certain use cases, I think we can save a few bucks and go for an RTX 2060 card that is using the TU104-150 GPU.

It surely is interesting to see such things happening – and pretty unexpected, too. We don’t expect that many EVGA RTX 2060 KO graphic cards in the market – or at least the TU104-150 GPU, as they are presumably repurposed chips.