MSI RTX 2060 Gaming Z 6G Review

Rating: 7.5.

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.

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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