Reviews of Intel Arc B580 are out – the best video card for the money

Sales of the new generation Battlemage Intel Arc B580 video card will start tomorrow. Intel allowed specialized publications and bloggers to talk about this new product today, but only the reference version of the video card was presented in the reviews – the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition. Publications of reviews of models with additional factory overclocking from Intel partners will begin to appear on the day the video card sales start, that is, December 13.

Image source: TechPowerUp

Intel Arc B580 is a mid-range solution. Like its little sister Arc B570, which will not go on sale until January 16 next year, it is based on the Xe2 Battlemage architecture. This architecture is also used in the integrated graphics of Intel Lunar Lake processors for laptops.

Image Source: Intel

The Intel Arc B580 model received the BGM-G21 graphics processor, produced using a 5nm process technology. The chip contains 20 cores on the Xe2 architecture (2560 shader engines), 160 texture units, 80 rasterization units, 160 tensor cores and 20 cores for second-generation ray tracing. Intel says the Xe2 architecture delivers a 70% performance boost per core compared to the previous generation Arc Alchemist graphics. The base GPU frequency of the new card is 1700 MHz, and in Boost mode it increases to 2670 MHz.

Intel Arc B580 is equipped with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory with support for a 192-bit bus and a bandwidth of 456 GB / s. In the reference version, the card has one 8-pin connector for additional power. The power consumption of the new product is stated at 190 W. The Arc B580 uses only 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes. It is recommended to use Resizable BAR together with it.

The card supports hardware acceleration AV1, HEVC, AVC, VP9 and XAVC-H. In addition, it supports proprietary XeSS 2 scaling and XeSS Frame Generation technologies, which improve gaming performance. The card is equipped with one HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort 2.1. One of the DisplayPort 2.1 connectors complies with the UHBR13.5 (54 Gbps) standard, the other two are UHBR10 (40 Gbps).

The Intel Arc B580, with a suggested price of $250, is positioned as a solution for 1080p gaming at maximum quality settings and 1440p gaming at reduced image quality settings.

The first reviews of the video card show that it copes with its task. According to TechPowerUp, the Arc B580 in the reference version in games with a resolution of 1080p is up to 42% faster than the predecessor Arc A580 of the Alchemist generation, 5% faster than the competitor GeForce RTX 4060 and almost 15% faster than the AMD Radeon RX 7600. The older model Radeon RX 7600 XT on 4% slower than the newcomer from Intel, but almost $60 more expensive. However, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti provides 21% more frames per second, and the Radeon RX 7700 XT is 33% faster than the new Arc B580, but these cards also cost about $400.

When using a higher resolution, the Arc B580 is also faster than the competition. The new Intel product overtakes the GeForce RTX 4060 by an average of 8%, the Radeon RX 7600 model is 9% slower than the newcomer, the Arc A770 model is 12% behind it, and the direct predecessor Arc A580 is by as much as 30%. However, when playing at 1440p resolution, in any case, you will have to sacrifice either graphics quality or use scaling technology. And in some cases you will need to come to terms with both. According to a TechPowerUp reviewer, the card is difficult to recommend as a reliable choice for 1440p gaming for less demanding gamers.

Relative ray tracing performance at 1080p

In the new Xe2 graphics architecture, Intel has improved ray tracing performance. In this aspect, the Arc B580 is certainly better than its direct competitors from AMD. At 1080p, the GeForce RTX 4060 still has an edge over the Arc B580, but once games are run at 1440p, the green’s advantage disappears as they run out of dedicated memory.

The GeForce RTX 4060 has only 8 GB of video memory versus 12 GB for the Arc B580. Therefore, the Arc B580 can even outperform the much more expensive 8GB GeForce RTX 4060 Ti in some cases. The 16GB version of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is still way ahead, but it’s almost twice as expensive ($425 vs. $250).

Relative ray tracing performance at 1440p

The transition to TSMC’s new 5nm process technology, coupled with architectural changes, has definitely benefited the Intel Battlemage series of video cards. When gaming, the Arc B580 consumes 185W, making it much more energy efficient than the previous generation Arc A770, which consumed 235W. The new card also consumes less than the Radeon RX 7600 XT, which requires 198 W. The Radeon RX 7600 model requires 30 W less power (154 W), but this is a small difference considering the performance that the Arc B580 provides. On the other hand, the GeForce RTX 4060 is more energy efficient compared to the new product. The “green” card requires only 128 W in games.

Power consumption of Intel Arc B580 in different usage scenarios

However, reviewers weren’t very happy with the card’s power consumption when idle, as well as in non-gaming scenarios. When idle, the Arc B580 can consume 34 W, which reviewers found excessive for a graphics card released in 2024. For comparison, the idle power consumption of the GeForce RTX 4060 is 14 W, the Radeon RX 7600 XT is 4 W, and the Radeon RX 7600 is only 2 W. Arc Alchemist cards released in 2022 had the same issue, and Intel unfortunately still hasn’t fixed it. The company’s solution is to use ASMP power settings, which are disabled by default on most desktop PCs and which most users have probably never even heard of. To enable them, you need to go into the motherboard BIOS. Enabling ASMP does indeed reduce the graphics card’s idle power consumption to 7 W (when connecting a single monitor), however, when using a multi-monitor configuration or when playing video, the card’s power consumption still remains high – 31 and 36 W, respectively.

In the reference Arc B580 Limited Edition, the card has a relatively low noise level of about 30 dBA. Some of the most affordable versions of the GeForce RTX 4060 are equipped with lower quality coolers that are noisier. The temperatures of the new product are also acceptable – 73 ° C for the GPU under load. If Arc Alchemist video cards in the reference version did not have a function to stop the fans when there was low or no load on the graphics subsystem, then Battlemage now has such a feature. However, the operation of this function on the Arc B580 is somewhat annoying, since the fans start up every few seconds. Perhaps we are talking about an error in the operation of the fan control algorithm – the answer to the question will be revealed in future software updates. In versions from partners equipped with even more efficient cooling systems, the GPU and memory temperatures should be even lower.

Temperatures

Overall, reviewers call the Arc B580 a great value for the money. The advantages of the card include the ratio of the price of the video card to its performance, support for ray tracing and XeSS 2 frame generation technology, high energy efficiency in games, a fan stop function, low operating temperatures, as well as good capabilities for hardware video encoding and decoding. The disadvantages include high power consumption when idle (the ASMP mode must be enabled in the BIOS), software errors in the fan operation algorithm, the use of only eight PCIe 4.0 lanes, and the need to use a Resizable BAR.