RTX 2060 Laptop in 2025 – Still Good Enough For Gaming?
This is my HP Omen gaming laptop – this bad boy is a 2020 model, making it between 4 and 5 years old, and it’s sporting a Ryzen 4800H with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, and importantly here, an RTX 2060 Laptop GPU with 6GB of VRAM. Considering I mostly use this for programming these days, I want to know how well that 2060 holds up for gaming, and to no one’s surprise, it’s a hell of a lot better than the other older machines I’ve checked out recently! Let’s take a look.
At 1080p, the display resolution, in CS2 on low settings you can expect perfectly playable performance. I got around 98 FPS average playing against bots, which means in ‘real’ games you should expect a touch more. That does mean it’s considerably closer to the older machines than the high spec comparison, the STRIX Scar 16 with its RTX 4080 and 13980HX, but it’s nothing to sniff at. In Rainbow Six Siege it’s better – 142 FPS average. That is again still closer to zero than it is to the Scar, which was actually tested on medium settings, but still. 142 FPS on low is more than playable, and actually leaves room for higher settings if you’d prefer, although we’ll get back to that in a second. As for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it’s actually a considerable bit ahead of the Nitro 5’s RX 560 at 86 FPS versus 49 FPS average – although the Scar does still run ahead, on the highest setting preset, versus lowest – hell even the 1% lows are higher than the average on the 2060, but as I’ve said in these videos, this isn’t exactly a fair fight.
Seeing as this machine can actually run some intensive games with reasonable performance, I’ve included Cyberpunk and Hitman here too. Cyberpunk first, on medium settings nets 54 FPS average, which considering it’s damn cyberpunk really isn’t bad. I mean it’s about half the performance of the Scar, but even when new it was well under half the price, so it’s hard to argue the performance here. It’s plenty playable – if a little cinematic at times – but that’s fine. Hitman shows quite the performance delta – the GPU data anyway really shows the difference, with the 4080 in the Scar running away with 255 FPS average compared to 66 FPS on the 2060, but 66 FPS is still a playable experience!
I mentioned earlier about being able to play on higher settings on this thing, and that’s definitely the case. Even just looking at Siege and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, pumping those up to medium settings hardly impacts the performance in a super significant way, while giving you a decent bit more visual quality. Sure, for Siege it might be worth keeping it on low if you want to be as competitive as possible – although let’s face it this isn’t exactly a pro-esports machine, so you certainly wouldn’t be wrong for trading a few FPS for some visual quality! Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a game where you can’t really have a competitive advantage, so trading 86 FPS for 70, but much better visuals very much feels like a worthy tradeoff to me. Being able to run at above minimum settings while still retaining a playable experience is a really good sign for the gaming experience health of this thing.
Oh, and if you were wondering about that 4800H, according to Cinebench anyway it’s actually pretty decent. 1200 points in single threaded and just shy of 10,000 points in multi threaded isn’t bad, considering a much newer 13980HX isn’t even double that in single threaded and has twice the threads as this thing, that’s decent. Blender has it taking just under 4 minutes for the BMW scene and a bit of 21 minutes for the Gooseberry scene. Obviously compared to the Scar that’s pretty slow, but compared to all the other old machines I’ve tested it’s lightyears ahead. It only drew around 45 watts as well, which is mighty impressive compared to the 126.5 watts the Scar sucks back! In fact, it’d be really cool to see how the 13980HX would do with a 45 watt power limit compared to this thing! Sadly I don’t have the Scar to run tests on, but if I can get my hands on something like it I’ll give that a try!
One thing I haven’t actually mentioned in these videos that is worth noting about these older machines is their poor connectivity. In this machine’s case, the IO is actually decent. It has USB 3, dual Type C with one doing DisplayPort ALT mode, HDMI, Ethernet, and SD card reader, combo headphone jack and DC in, which is a marked upgrade over the older machines for sure, although this still suffers from relatively slow WiFi. I mean, this one in particular is decent enough. It’s a Realtek 8822CE chip which means it does 802.11ac, for up to around 600Mb/s, but compared to newer AX, WiFi 6E and even the newest WiFi 7 stuff, this is positively dark-ages. Considering I have gigabit internet to my home, this cannot saturate my internet connection. That’s a fail to me.
One area that does improve every time I jump to a newer machine is the display. Finally we have a higher-than-60-hertz refresh rate display! This is a 144Hz IPS display, which I just had to response time test with my open source response time tool (available at OSRTT.com, link in the description) and.. Yeah it’s still not great. It averaged out to 11 milliseconds, which is not too far of twice the refresh rate window meaning this is actually an 89 hertz panel that’s being marketed as a 144Hz one. You can see the ghosting on the high speed footage too, although this really isn’t all that bad compared to a lot of other laptops I’ve tested over the years. It’s also considerably more vibrant and bright than most too – and a damn sight better than the rest of the older machines in this series. This is actually a great experience to use day to day.
Honestly, the overall user experience here is still fantastic. It has plenty of power for programming, the keyboard is actually really nice, the trackpad is decently sized with all the gestures you’d expect, and as I said the display is a pretty thing to look at, even if it isn’t quite as fast as it should be. Of course, the main question I was hoping to answer here is, is the 2060 still good for gaming? And the answer I think is a resounding yes. Sure, you’re not getting hundreds of FPS basically anywhere, but most games you throw at it will be playable if nothing else. It isn’t a powerhouse, and you aren’t going to be playing at high settings on most stuff – but then you weren’t going to when it was new either, so I think this is still a great choice for a starter machine, or if you’ve already got one you can rest assured it’s good enough.
