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Taking a look under the hood
Pulling the thin backplate I find a few controllers connected to the backplate via a thermal pad. The surprising part I think was a mini card with the PCB falling short by a decent margin. Then the first thing that got my attention was the question of how the 8-pin was extended to the far edge of the cooler plate. The default would likely be the same as we have seen before on the GTX 1060 which is cable leads extending the connector.
To say the RTX 2060 FE was a monumental pain in the ass to disassemble would be the understatement of the century. Exactly like we saw with the 2070 so much so that I actually reused the photos for this one. Once you get to this point where you have the card partially butterflied out onto my bench I realized that you could not really pull it apart any more than maybe 30 degrees before you put some serious stress on the solder joints for the 8 pin and also the multi-pin fan/LED connector. Turns out you have to remove some of the front hex screws which normally hold the fans but in this case, they also seem to secure to part of the baseplate of the cooler.
Once we got it apart we found that there was plenty of slack in the fan connector it was simply glued to the baseplate which meant the slack really didn’t give when trying to get the card apart. Do note if you do get an FE card and decide to disassemble it for any reason, pay special attention to this fan cable as it can come unplugged during reassembly and don’t want that.
Another note is you can see the cooler flipped up to the right and it definitely is a heat pipe based cooler so not a full vapor chamber like we saw on the FE higher end 2080/2080Ti models.
Here now with the card fully released of all brackets you can see that the PCB is quite simple or much simpler vs the 2080 and Ti models. the VRM is a 6 Phase which means we can feel pretty confident along with the single 8-pin that we won’t be pushing too awful far before exceeding the capabilities of the power we can feed this unit. Also, you can see the 8-pin fed by wires to the PCB.
Here is the same TU106 die (you cannot see the changes for 1060 as they are internal), it is noticeably smaller than it RTX powered bigger brothers and understandably so as it has much less going on under the hood with only 3 GPCs. the total die size is 445 mm² whereas the RTX 2080 comes in at 545 mm² and the monolithic RTX 2080 Ti tops out at 754 mm². The only way to really tell this is an RTX 2060 and not a 2070 is that this GPU is labeled TU106-200A-KA-A1 whereas the RTX 2070 We showed previously was TU106-400A-A1.
Here you see the Samsung GDDR6 modules which are 1GB per IC Spec’d at 7000MHz (14000MHz effective data rate) These are different than the Micron ICs we saw on the previous RTX 2070 model card and so we will have to see when we get to overclocking exactly how these perform when pushed.
The power stages on the RTX 2060 are On Semiconductor NCP302150 which are 45A optimal units. This is yet again another a bit of a step down from the 55A units we saw on the RTX 2070 and with less GPU to feed it kinda makes sense.
The voltage control for the GPU is handled by a uP9512R and can work up to 8 phases but in this case, it is simply put to work on the 6 phases for VGPU which the RTX 2060 offers.
The Memory VRM which are pretty obscure units appearing to be sourced from Ubiq Semi model number QM3816N and with a lack of reliable datasheet appear to be rated at about 32A @100°C T_Case. This is not a bad thing just odd for such a component change where we saw ON Semiconductor units across the board on the previous model even on memory. This must have been an aggressive move to ensure they could hit the needed price point with the RTX 2060.
