As tweeted by @momomo_us, Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 2060 12GB showed up at a European online retailer known as PC21.fr. The product page has since been pulled, but it listed the card as an RTX 2060 12GB Ventus from MSI and was priced at €537, the equivalent of $608. However, there was no product image to see and the actual specs on the product page list it as being a 6GB model, so things certainly didn't add up and liberal doses of salt should be applied.
Nvidia has not announced an official release date or pricing details of any kind, and we still have no details of 3rd party AIB cards from Nvidia's partners. For all we know, Nvidia could release the 2060 12GB tomorrow or wait until next year. However, given Nvidia did reveal the card's full specifications, we suspect it will arrive sooner than later.
Nvidia confirmed the existence of the RTX 2060 12GB last week in the patch notes for its latest game-ready graphics driver. Then a day later, Nvidia updated its website with full specifications of the new 12GB SKU.
The new RTX 2060 12GB will be a blend of both RTX 2060 and RTX 2060 Super characteristics. It features an increased core count of 2176 cores, which is identical to the RTX 2060 Super, but memory bandwidth will remain the same as the RTX 2060 6GB at 336GB/s. But the memory capacity was doubled by using 2GB chips instead of 1GB chips. We don't expect the new 12GB card to equate or surpass RTX 2060 Super performance in most games, except where memory usage goes beyond 8GB.
While Nvidia has kept the RTX 2060 12GB's release date hidden for the time being, if we had to guess, the Ventus RTX 2060 12GB listing was likely a placeholder for the real thing, inadvertently pushed live on the site too early.
If that price ends up being indicative of the real card, this could be one of the cheapest current Nvidia RTX GPUs at street prices. The original RTX 2060 6GB averages around $570 based on our GPU price tracker. The RTX 2060 Super goes for around $700 while the RTX 3060 12GB averages around $750. Paying $30 more for double the VRAM seems reasonable, but we'll have to see actual US online prices and test the card's performance before drawing any final conclusions.
