Founders Edition vs AIB Graphics card – ZOTAC RTX 2060 AMP
|You may have seen a load of people, including myself, with one of these shiny looking cards – an Nvidia “Founders edition”, and have wondered what’s the deal with them compared to the more normal “add in board partner” cards from the likes of ZOTAC, like this one, Asus, MSI, EVGA, Gigabyte and all the others. Hopefully, in this video, I’ll explain it all for you.
First up we need to understand what a “founders edtion” card is – it’s a card made by NVIDIA, sold by NVIDIA, and generally only available through NVIDIA’s website directly. Here’s the strange thing though, this style of card is pretty new. Before the 10 series, nvidia made what they called a “reference card” with a lackluster blower style heatsink. AMD actually still makes them too. The reason for being a “reference card” was that it was meant to be a “reference” for the board partners – ZOTAC, Asus, EVGA, etc, on how NVIDIA recommended they layout the card, for memory, power delivery and i/o. These cards weren’t really sold directly, and while you could normally buy the same style from the board partners, it rarely came from NVIDIA directly.
This changed with the 10 series, where they launched the “founders edition”, and actually started selling cards directly through their site. The 10 series cards still had a fairly lackluster, if a little more pretty, blower style cooler, meaning while you got to wave around your “founders edition” card to your mates, it still wasn’t actually all that great compared to the non-reference versions.
And that brings us to today. Nvidia redesigned their cooler with this gorgeous dual fan design, and now has some real heft to it too. They’ve made some strange choices, like putting the 8 pin power connector on the back of the card, rather than the side where everyone else puts it, but still, performs well.
So that’s where this one comes in, how does it compare? Is it worth the extra £30 more? Why would you go for one of these, over the founders edition? Let’s find out.
Spec wise these cards are almost identical, except the ZOTAC card has a slightly higher listed boost clock of 1800MHz, vs the founders’ 1680MHz. In the real world though, they actually maxed out at 2040MHz on the ZOTAC card, and 1950MHz on the founders – so about a 5% difference.
In games, rather unsurprsingly, the ZOTAC card is about 5% faster – here’s my full benchmark numbers.
So if they perform about the same, is there any other differences? Well, the ZOTAC card is a bit shorter, much closer to the length of the PCB than the founders edition, but still features a dual fan design. Both temps and noise were almost identical, with both cards hitting just about 70°c, and being a tad noisey – at least with an open air case.
Zotac have moved the 8 pin power connector back to a sensible place on the side, although they’ve then gone and ruined it with a metal housing that makes it pretty difficult to actually plug the damn thing in. They’ve also got some side mounted LEDs under the ZOTAC GAMING logo, and a slightly different rear I/O, with the ZOTAC card dropping the USB C and DVI ports in favour of an extra displayport – but otherwise pretty similar.
So, should you get a founders edition over an AIB card? It’s totally up to you. If there’s stock available, and you like the cooler, go for it. If you want a bit of extra performance and customizability/overclocking tools, for a bit of extra cash, then grab an aftermarket one like this. The choice is yours.
ZOTAC 2060 on Amazon: http://techteamgb.co.uk/zotac2060
Founders Edition: http://techteamgb.co.uk/rtx2060f
Products shown provided by: Zotac, Nvidia
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TechteamGB assumes no liability for damage, misuse or misunderstanding of the information contained in this video. Use this information at your own risk. TechteamGB cannot guarantee any particular result from the information contained in this video, and all information was presented as correct as of filming. TechteamGB accepts no liability for information being proven incorrect after the creation of the video, and all information should be taken as opinion and guidance, not fact. This video was not sponsored by anyone, and TechteamGB does not accept monetary – or non-monetary – benefits to alter opinions or results.