Review EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC: Cheaper and more feature-packed than Nvidia's Founders

EVGA's special GeForce RTX 2070 XC graphics card is cooler, easier to adjust, and as fast as the Nvidia RTX 2070 Founders Edition. This device packs special hardware for real-time beam tracking and enhanced AI graphics. And the price of $ 50 is also cheaper.

That shouldn't be a big problem. The Nvidia Founder Edition Card is designed to be a premium price model for halo (ish), right? But when the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti were released last month, third-party board makers such as EVGA, Asus, and MSI treated the premium price of the Founders Edition model as a floor fee rather than a ceiling fee. As such, all top class graphics cards are sold significantly more than the initial price stated by Nvidia. That is very annoying.

Fortunately, that didn't happen with the launch of the GeForce RTX 2070. You will find cheaper options available from third-party manufacturers on the first day, such as $ 550 EVGA RTX 2070 XC. And while the $ 700 RTX 2080 trades a punch with the older $ 700 GTX 1080 Ti, the EVGA RTX 2070 XC offers bump performance over the GTX 1080 in traditional games to go with all futuristic ray ray appointments.

EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC: Specs, price, and release date

The EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC’s underlying specs hew closely to those of the Founders Edition, delivering a small clock speed bump compared to the GPU’s reference specs.

CUDA cores: 2,304
Clock speed: 1,410MHz base, 1,710MHz boost (1,620MHz reference)
RT cores: 36
Tensor cores: 288
Texture units: 144
ROP units: 64
Memory capacity: 8GB GDDR6
Memory path: 256 bits
Memory bandwidth: 448GBps
Ports: One VirtualLink/USB-C, three DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.0b
Power: One 6-pin, one 8-pin, 550W+ power supply required
Release date: October 17, 2018
Price: $550

In addition to an incredible speed increase, EVGA also allows you to increase the RTX 2070 XC power limit by 30 percent, giving more manual overclockers more headroom than the other 20-series RTX graphics cards we've seen. The Nvidia Founders Edition only allows you to crash power by 16 percent. We will discuss the overclock performance in a separate section later. The RTX 2070 packs the same 8GB VRAM as its predecessor, but moving from GDDR5X to GDDR6 delivers a massive upgrade to memory bandwidth.

This GPU promises to unlock new features in the future, too, thanks to a special RT core for real-time beam tracking and special core tensors to bring the power of machine learning to the game, which is most felt in the form of Deep Level Super Sampling. DLSS is an antialiasing method that provides visual smoothness equivalent to Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) with a much lower performance cost, using the power of AI to make the scene more efficient. The good news: Dozens of games have promised ray tracing or DLSS support. Bad news: There are no games that support technology, so if you buy an RTX graphics card, you bet that game developers will embrace Nvidia's features en masse, and those features will prove impressive like Nvidia's marketing claims.

We will see later. Meanwhile, you can learn more about beam tracking and DLSS in our depths in the Nvidia Turing GPU as well as future technology parts from our RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti reviews, where we check out some of the demos provided by Nvidia.

EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC: Design and features

While the EVGA RTX 2070 XC mirrors Nvidia’s Founders Edition under the hood, it’s the custom-designed cooler that sets it apart.

Review EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 XC: Cheaper and more feature-packed than Nvidia's Founders

EVGA overhauled the cooler for the new generation. While the company's new exterior design may prove divisive, EVGA claims technology is more effective than before. Double fans have 23.8 percent more than before, for 11.5 percent more air flow. EVGA says all the small "E" letters that are emblazoned throughout the blade somehow help reduce the light level by up to four percent. (We count them there for activities.)

Note that although the $ 550 RTX 2070 XC has an EVGA iCX2 cooler design, it does not include safer and sensors that are higher than the broad range of your device. It's really available for the more premium RTX 2.75 EVGA graphics card. (The RTX 2070 XC is a traditional two slot card, 10.6 inches.)

Digging deeper, the EVGA type heat sink hole with holes punched to improve airflow was impressed, but the company claimed it had succeeded in increasing the total heat sink dump area by 58 percent with this new generation graphics card. Blow backplate press, meanwhile, it is said to increase thermal conductivity by 155 percent. There are many numbers that must be discarded, but there is one thing that is certain, because our tests will be revealed later: EVGA RTX 2070 XC works very cold.

The online reaction to the redesigned EVGA shroud has ... mixed, to say the least. Some people like transparent plastic shrouds and closed fans in small "E", and some people hate it. For people who like it, EVGA now lets you add a personal touch to your system by exchanging trim around fans with different color options, despite the additional cost of the kit. The company's extraordinary Precision X1 software, which was rebuilt from generation to generation with great success, allows you to change the color of the RGB LED inside the logo on the edge of the card.

And if you hate the new design? You cannot see the shroud and fan when the graphics card is installed in a traditional system, with the fan orientation down. It only looks like other recent EVGA graphics cards, with a lit logo on the side and a complicated backplate at the top.

Enough about how EVGA RTX 2070 XC looks. How to handle it? Let's go to the benchmark.