Nvidia RTX 2060 for $179, This Will Go Fast

(Image credit: Asus)

If you're looking for a decent budget to midrange graphics card, this Asus RTX 2060 Cyber Monday deal on Amazon (opens in new tab) is about as good as we're likely to see. Priced at $179, down from a previous $279 and beating the former best price on an RTX 2060 of $219 by $40, this one will go fast. Note that you may have to click "other sellers" to get this price — it's not always the top option.

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Asus RTX 2060 Dual OC: now $179 at Amazon (opens in new tab) (was $279)
The RTX 2060 still consistently outperforms the newer RTX 3050, provided you don't exceed its 6GB VRAM. This is the lowest price we've ever seen on the GPU, and likely the last we'll see of RTX 20-series deals.

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If you check our GPU benchmarks hierarchy , you'll see that the RTX 2060 performs a few percent faster than the RTX 3050 — and that applies to ray tracing games as well as rasterized games. That's largely thanks to its having a 192-bit memory interface and 336 GB/s of bandwidth, compared to a 128-bit interface and just 224 GB/s on the 3050.

It's not as fast as AMD's RX 6600 in rasterization games, though it does rank ahead of it for DXR (DirectX Raytracing) performance. Now that the RX 6600 $189 deal is gone, this is about as good as it gets for a "budget" GPU, and it will easily beat cards like the RX 6500 XT, GTX 1650, or Arc A380.

Turing has been out since 2018, and the RTX 2060 originally launched in early 2019. Four years later, we'd normally expect supply to be long gone, but the GPU shortages of the past two years have kept it in production. With cryptocurrency mining (on GPUs) now effectively dead for the time being, this should finally represent the end of the line for the venerable TU106 GPUs and the Turing Architecture.

Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.