EVGA’s RTX 2060 KO launches at $279 – the same price as AMD’s RX 5600 XT
A knockout blow aimed at Navi graphics cards?
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EVGA revealed its new GeForce RTX 2060 KO Gaminggraphics card atCES 2020carrying a major price cut, but now the GPU is up for pre-order, and you can get it even cheaper than expected at a supremely tempting $279 (about £215).
This is the price on EVGA’s website in the US now that pre-orders are live for the new base model of the 2060, which should be priced at $299.99 (about £230) – as announced at CES – but is currently available with a $20 discount, so you’ll only pay $279.99.
There’s a limit of two graphics cards per household, and the shipping date for buyers is pegged at January 13, the start of next week.
Sadly theRTX 2060 KO Gaming– or indeed the overclockedKO Ultra variant(with a 1755MHz boost clock, as opposed to 1680MHz) which retails at $299.99, again after a $20 discount – aren’t yet available for UK buyers, but EVGA’s European website notes that the cards are ‘coming soon’. So hopefully we won’t have long to wait, and more to the point, we’ll see a similar launch discount.
The price of $279 represents a 20% drop from the current recommended price of the RTX 2060, which is $349 (about £270). It also means that this RX 2060 is pitched at exactly the same level as the recommended price forAMD’s new Radeon RX 5600 XT, which goes on sale January 21.
Different ballgame
Over at CES,AMD was pushing the RX 5600 XT’s gaming chops, showing it comfortably outdoing the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti – but comparing it to the RTX 2060, well, that’s obviously a different ballgame (and don’t forget the RTX range also brings ray tracing cores into the bargain, above and beyond the GTX range).
Whether this is just EVGA acting alone, or perhaps the start of a more general move forNvidiaand partners to look towards reducing RTX 2060 GPUs issomething we’ve already debated. But whatever the case, rival 2060 cards may need to think about shifting to match this kind of pricing regardless – or risk looking shaky value propositions themselves.
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Those who’ve been sitting on the fence in terms of committing to RTX may well feel the compulsion to take the leap into the ray-traced garden, as it were, given the pricing of this particular 2060 model.
One thing’s for sure – it’ll be interesting to watch AMD’s reaction on the pricing front, and indeed other third-party Nvidia GPU manufacturers.
ViaWccftech
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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