RTX 2060 12GB is the card for miners
Several retailers have already started selling the new 12GB GeForce RTX 2060, but it seems that the products, offered at prices above € 600, have already captured the interest of miners. An anonymous OEM said, “This is going to be more of a mining-focused board, so HQ won't make a big media push on it.”Photo Credit: @momomo_us, @ davideneco25320 But how does the Is the 12GB GeForce RTX 2060 a card suitable for mining? Ethereum hashing ends up being heavily dependent on memory bandwidth. A GPU with twice the memory bandwidth can generally perform ethash calculations twice as fast. This means that the 12GB RTX 2060 should by no means be a miner-focused card, unless NVIDIA's partners know they can get more money by selling directly to them.
The RTX 2060 original is equipped with 6GB of GDDR6 memory with a speed of 14Gb / s. Doubling the memory could mean that there are some mining algorithms that can perform better, but right now Ethereum only needs just over 4GB of VRAM and the size of the directed acyclic graph (DAG) at the core of ethash will not exceed 6GB. until about May 2023. At that point, we hope that Ethereum will finally pass to "proof of stake", but given the repeated delays this may not happen.
However, according to what was released by the PCMarket portal in Hong Kong , which managed to get its hands on the ZOTAC RTX 2060 12GB Twin Edge model, the card offers really pretty good performance, even outperforming the RTX 3060 and RX 6600 XT, with truly remarkable efficiency.
Photo Credit : PCMarket This is certainly not good news for gamers at all, given the continuing shortage of modern Ampere and Big Navi-based video cards.
Nvidia quietly launches the RTX 2060 12GB: an expensive, hard-to-find card that miners will love
What just happened? Following Nvidia’s confirmation via a driver changelog last week that a 12GB version of the RTX 2060 was on its way, the ‘new’ card has now launched—not that you’re likely to have noticed as they don’t appear to be available in the US yet, and Nvidia hasn’t mentioned the release.
We’d long heard rumors that Nvidia was set to relaunch the Turing-era 12nm RTX 2060 with the VRAM upgraded from 6GB of GDDR6 to 12GB, and it was all but confirmed in the company’s Game Ready Driver changelog last week. The predicted December 7 launch date proved accurate, but Nvidia didn’t make any noise about the launch. It even encouraged board partners not to send review samples to the press.
We don’t even have an MSRP for the RTX 2060 12GB. It was expected to be around the same $349 mark as the original version. MSRPs mean nothing these days, of course, but the new card is selling for about 600 - 700 euros, which is roughly the same $670 - $800 price we can expect to pay for the RTX 2060 6GB right now.
Not that finding an RTX 2060 12GB is easy, if at all possible, for those in the US. Most appear on AIB partners’ Chinese websites, and some are on European retail sites—Nvidia isn't making Founders Editions. I found one on a UK site, but it isn’t listed as available to buy.
As previously predicted, the RTX 2060 12GB comes with a TU106-300 GPU featuring 2176 CUDA cores. It uses 16Gb (2GB) GDDR6 modules clocked at 14Gbps and has a 1650MHz boost clock.
Perhaps the reason for the muted release is that the RTX 2060 12GB appears to be targeted at miners, an area that Nvidia has long tried to distance its gaming cards from. These aren’t Lite Hash Rate models like the updated RTX 3000 series, and PCMarket HK, which managed to get hold of a card, writes that its mining potential exceeds that of the RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6600 XT.
Nvidia recently said it believes graphics card prices and availability will improve in the second half of next year when supply and demand even out. It's a nice thought, but don't hold your breath.