THERE WAS
a frisson of excitement when Intel started making discrete graphics cards. At last, there would be a third player, and the possibility of a market shake-up. Maybe it would even help keep the price of high-end cards down. Intel, however, had other ideas. It started slowly, at the bottom of the market. The drivers proved under-developed, and the range started well away from the big players, whose monster cards have remained expensive. But, slowly and steadily, Intel has been building on its start. First, we got the Arc Alchemist A770, A750, and A380. Its latest offering is the Arc Alchemist A580, the first ‘5’ series card, which has been delayed after being announced over a year ago.
The first thing to know is that it costs $179. It has been a while since we’ve seen a respectable graphics card launching at such a price. It’s aimed squarely at 1080p gaming, and is built around a cut-down ACM-G10 GPU, the same chip as the A750 and A770. It has 24 Xe cores, and 24 ray-tracing cores. This puts it closer to the A750, which has 28 of each, than the A380, which has just eight. There’s 8GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, which is good for a transfer rate of 512Gb/s. The 1,700MHz clock is a slight disappointment, given that the rest of the Alchemist range manage over 2GHz. It has a quoted power consumption of 185W, but it reportedly draws over 210W when working hard. It even manages to draw over 40W at idle.
The card has been put through thorough testing,