Intel finally releases its Arc A580 graphics card — and its price might make it the best cheap GPU going
Intel surprised everyone this week when it released its Arc A580 graphics card, a GPU that was first announced last year but has been out of action since.
The Intel Arc A580 (which has been rumored in recent weeks thanks to leaked benchmarks) sits in the middle of Intel’s Arc graphics card stack between the Arc A380 and the Intel Arc A750. At $179.99 (about £135 / AU$260), the A580 is officially slightly cheaper than the A750, which has an official MSRP of $249.99 (about £190 / AU$360), so it has potential for a spot on our best cheap graphics card list, although we won’t know for sure until we get one for review.
There isn’t a Limited Edition reference card like there was for the Intel Arc A770 and Intel Arc A750, so you’ll have to purchase the A580 through a third-party manufacturer. The three companies that Intel mentions in its report press release The card announcement includes ASRock, Gunnir and Sparkle, but it’s not clear if Acer will also release an A580.
Acer has released A770 and A750 cards, so an A580 card could be in the works. We’ve reached out to Acer for comment and will update this page if and when we hear back.
| Header cell – Column 0 | Arch A580 | Bow A750 |
|---|---|---|
| US MSRP | 179.99 | 249.99 |
| GPU | ACM-G10 | ACM-G10 |
| Calculate units | 24 | 28 |
| Shadows | 3072 | 3584 |
| Ray Tracing Cores | 24 | 28 |
| AI cores | 384 | 448 |
| Boost clock | 2400 | 2400 |
| VRAM | 8GB | 8GB |
| VRAM speed | 16Gbps | 16Gbps |
| Memory bus | 256 bit | 256 bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 512 GB/sec | 512 GB/sec |
| TDP | 185W | 225W |
News of an upcoming release of the Intel Arc A580 has been circulating for a few weeks now, and benchmarks at least gave us an inkling that something was in the offing, even if Intel itself has remained tight-lipped about it.
Intel told TechRadar that the delay in its release was to ensure the Arc team had enough time to resolve driver issues after the launch of the A700 series cards before adding another product to the stack .
“Since we introduced the Intel Arc A770 and A750 products last year, our teams have been focused on improving the gaming experience with those products before introducing new ones,” an Intel spokesperson said. “Now that we’ve significantly improved our drivers and legacy API performance, the time is right to expand the Intel Arc discrete graphics family with a compelling option that delivers advanced 1080p gaming with modern features and the most complete media engine in the industry. segment.”
We’re still in the process of securing our own device for review, so we can’t say for sure how close performance is to the A750, but the specs for the two cards are quite similar, and our friends at Tom’s hardware reviewed the card this week and found its performance to be quite close to the A750, which does complicate this card’s position in the market.
A real budget offering from Intel?
As many have already noted, the Intel Arc A580 is very close to the Intel Arc A750 in terms of current discounted price, something that is only going to become more of an issue as we head into the holiday season and Black Friday graphics card deals increase. serious.
And since the A750 is more powerful thanks to four additional compute units, many people will buy the A750 instead of the A580, which will certainly cannibalize the A580’s sales.
That means the price of the A580 will drop very quickly. It’s more than likely that the A580 will sooner or later retail for around $150, making it much cheaper than the AMD RX 6650 XT and RX 7600.
And while these two cards are among the best graphics cards for budget and 1080p gaming, the A580 has a real chance to become the real champion of budget graphics cards if the price drops by around 17%, which is almost a guarantee given the current state. from the market.
We won’t know until we get the card in ourselves, but the Arc A580 is already off to a solid start before you’ve even put it in your PC.