Colorful's New RTX 2060 12GB Models Listed in China

Nvidia's board partners have seemingly begun to distribute their RTX 2060 12GB cards to etailers and retailers, though not so much in the US. While it's unlikely to rank among the best graphics cards, a Chinese etailer already has two new Colorful RTX 2060 12GB models up for grabs, the Ultra White and the BattleAx Deluxe. Since these designs were previously only available on RTX 3000-series cards, it is likely that Colorful reused existing cooling solutions for the re-release of the RTX 2060. A third card that's referred to as the Colorful GeForce RTX 2060 model also joins the fray, offering a dual-fan cooling solution.

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The Ultra White and BattleAx Deluxe cater to slightly different audiences, though it's mostly a matter of aesthetics. As indicated by the name, the Ultra White is predominantly white with some color accents — including some iGAME branding bars in yellow. It has two larger fans on the edges of the card, with a smaller center fan. The BattleAx uses a more traditional color scheme consisting of a dark grey/black shroud with red accents. It also has three fans, but all three fans are the same size.

The Ultra White is positioned as the premium offering, featuring amenities such as an OC button for automatic overclocking. That will bring maximum boost clocks up to 1,695 MHz from the 1,650 MHz reference clock — not a massive overclock by any means. The BattleAx and the vanilla RTX 2060 12GB stick with pure reference clocks.

All three Colorful cards feature the same single HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI-D connectivity, the latter being something of a rarity these days. Note also that Nvidia's push for VirtualLink is all but dead, even in cards that once supported it, so none of the Colorful cards include the extra connector.

In terms of pricing, while it might be fun to think of this as a resurrection of sorts for the RTX 2060, the mere existence of these cards as we enter 2022 — three years after the RTX 2060 first launched — stands as a perfect indicator of just how bad the current state of the graphics card market really is.

The RTX 2060 6GB originally sold for $349 in early 2019, and later variants dropped the starting price to just $299 (to compete with the RX 5600 XT). Now, GPU prices on eBay put both of those cards right around the $570 mark. Not surprisingly, then, the Colorful 12GB models come in above that: $627 on the cheapest model (the vanilla RTX 2060 12GB), $643 for the BattleAx, and $675 for the Ultra White version, That's just shy of a 100% premium on three-years-old graphics technology, albeit with double the VRAM.

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As we discussed in the initial RTX 2060 12GB launch articles, many of the GPU manufacturers appear to be targeting miners with the new offering. That's strange, considering the mining performance will be relatively mediocre. We managed around 33 MH/s on the reference 2060 6GB after tuning, as you can see on our best mining GPUs list. Doubling the memory won't do anything to mining performance, as mining needs bandwidth more than capacity. Even stranger is that most of the 12GB 2060 cards are launching in China, which has been working hard to ban any cryptocurrency mining operations.

Perhaps there are gamers in China willing to pay the higher premium for more VRAM. More likely, these GPUs will eventually find their way into other markets, probably going into the crypto mines to toil away crunching hashes as long as possible. Just because China has banned mining doesn't mean the big Chinese mining farms can't relocate to other countries. That appears to be happening as the Bitcoin network hashrate is near its all-time high, while Ethereum's hashrate has mostly trended upward throughout 2021, with a short-lived dip in the May–July period.

If you're looking for a new graphics card, our advice continues to be exercising patience. Eventually, things will settle down and prices will start to get back to normal. It might take until the end of 2022, or even early 2023, but by then we'll also likely be looking at Intel Arc, Nvidia RTX 40-series, and AMD RX 7000-series cards that will all make the RTX 2060 12GB look rather pathetic.