| Intel Arc B580: $249 MSRP The second generation of Intel’s Arc Graphics improves on the original recipe in virtually every way, delivering great performance and awesome value. |
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Intel Arc B580 Specifications And Features
Comparing the B580 to its direct ancestors, you can see that it’s somewhat of a smaller GPU. It has fewer of nearly everything than ACM-G10 did, and yet the performance specifications don’t look too far off. Its closest relative looks to be the Arc A750 despite the “500-series” branding this new card has received.
A lot of this comes down to massive architectural improvements with an eye toward efficiency and making better use of the resources that were already there. Alchemist typically delivered less than stellar realized performance relative to its die area and power consumption. This was down to those aforementioned architectural choices, and now that Intel has had the chance to rectify those wrongs, the new part is looking to be in a much better position in the market.
Up Close And Personal With The Intel Arc B580
The Arc B580 card that we have in hand is a Limited Edition model, similar to NVIDIA’s Founders Edition cards. That means it’s branded “Intel”, and not any of the company’s board partners. It’s likely that one of those partners built these cards, but we didn’t take ours apart to try and find out who.
The card itself is handsome, in a rugged, unadorned way. It doesn’t have any RGB LEDs, nor in fact any LED lighting at all save for a white light behind the Intel Arc logo on top. The two large fans are off most of the time; only during intense gaming or compute workloads will they bother to spin up. Of course, you can control this yourself.
Around the back of the card we see a curious plastic backplate and a flow-through vent for the heatsink. Just like many other recent GPUs, the actual PCB for the Arc B580 is quite small, which allows the cooler to be significantly oversized and push air through the card to the CPU heatsink. Whether that’s a good thing will depend on how much airflow you have in your case—and how hot your CPU runs.
Looking at the bottom edge of the card, there’s not much to see aside from the golden fingers. If you look carefully, you’ll note that only half of the PCIe connector is actually wired up to anything. Like some other mainstream GPUs, the Arc B580 uses only a x8 electrical connection. While that’s technically only half the number of lanes, and hence half the bandwidth offered by a full x16 slot, it’s rare that a GPU in this class will need more bandwidth than offered by eight PCIe Gen 4 lanes. That’s right, Gen 4—while Intel plans to support PCIe 5.0 on these cards, they’re currently limited to PCIe 4.0 by firmware.
On the top of the card, you can confirm that Intel is still using the old-school peripheral card connectors for power — no 12V-2X6 shenanigans here. You only need to connect one eight-pin power connector and that does the job. We’re sure many partner cards will have grossly over-spec’d power allowances, but this one keeps it simple, and we appreciate that.
The Arc B580’s I/O cluster is standard stuff these days. You get three DisplayPort connections and an HDMI port. All three DisplayPort jacks support the latest 2.1 standard for 8K60 output or 4K at 120Hz; the marked DisplayPort connection is the primary jack that will be initialized first. The HDMI port supports HDMI 2.1a, allowing it to handle 8K at up to 120Hz, or 4K at a dizzying 480Hz.
The bare card reveals its secrets. The six DRAM ICs mark this GPU as having a 192-bit memory interface. That’s narrower than the last-gen Arc A580, but the memory speed has increased from 16 Gbps to 19 Gbps, which should compensate for the narrower bus to some degree. Does it help enough? Read on and find out.