Intel Arc A310 Graphics Card Quietly Goes Official

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Arc A300 series graphics cards
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel has undercut its entry-level Arc A380 with the official reveal of the previously leaked Arc A310. The Arc A380 wasn’t a powerhouse by any means and the new A310, based on the same "6nm" TSMC fabbed ACM-G11 GPU, offers only six Xe cores (versus A380's eight), and 50% less VRAM (4GB versus 6GB) on a narrower 64-bit bus. From what we have seen in the leaks and spills leading up to today, the Intel Arc A310 will be mostly sold to folks who only have the need for basic GPU acceleration, and perhaps only have room for a low profile graphics card design that doesn’t require additional power connectors. It's probably safe to say that the A310 won't make it on to our list of best best graphics cards for gaming in 2022.

Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • King_V
    and 50% less VRAM (4GB versus 6GB)
    That would be 33% less RAM. Or you could say that the A380 has 50% more RAM.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    Wait, this lil' thing is X16 while the 380 is X8? That doesn't make sense; is that correct? EDIT: I just saw the official slides and they list it as "up to", so both the 380 and 310 could be X16. I didn't know that.

    Other than that, I wonder what the purpose of this card really is? There already exists a 380 without a 6pin, so this would need to be for a very specific market or OEM reject perhaps?

    Regards.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    There would probably be room for a few of these models to be a PCIe 1x GPU.
    Reply
  • King_V
    -Fran- said:
    Other than that, I wonder what the purpose of this card really is? There already exists a 380 without a 6pin, so this would need to be for a very specific market or OEM reject perhaps?

    I suspect that, while they officially list the power at 75W, it's probably significantly lower, so, I would assume that it could more easily be made into a low-profile card while also having a single-slot-height cooler.
    Reply
  • ThisIsMe
    No matter how fast/good the new nVidia 40xx video encoder is/will be, these non-pro cards are still limited to 2 simultaneous encodes/transcodes. AMD’s video capabilities for RDNA 3 are still unknown, but all of their current and previous cards are now in third place.

    I can see many people buying these lower cost Intel GPU’s just to upgrade their video processing capabilities. A workstation with 4 ARC cards installed would be a video rendering powerhouse. All for the price of a single nVidia consumer card. Or simply slap one of these into an unused slot along side your existing 3070/80/90 and call it a day.
    Reply
  • Eximo
    I'm tempted to buy a new case after putting the ASRock A380 in my HTPC, the 8-pin power connector comes out right where the SATA power leads come out the back of my SATA SSD. Quite an effort to get that to fit. But the MSI A380 without a power connector isn't intended for direct sale, not sure I would go for a A310 unless it was like $75, if it is closer to $100, then the A380 makes more sense (as long as you have a PCIe 8-pin. I didn't, but I got a new SFX power supply, the old one had a six-pin, but was also pushing 10 years old.

    Took me a bit to get the audio working via HDMI, but after that, no complaints for general use and video playback. Tried one old DX9 title. Worked okay, but it did stutter when loading in new assets for some reason. Maybe a DX12 conversion hiccup?

    Might take it apart and re-paste it or something. It is right on the threshold of being passively cooled for video playback, spins the fan about once every three minutes or so. Need to measure it and see if there are any heatsinks that might fit it better.
    Reply
  • cschepers
    -Fran- said:
    Other than that, I wonder what the purpose of this card really is? There already exists a 380 without a 6pin, so this would need to be for a very specific market or OEM reject perhaps?

    My guess is it's for corporate PC's that need a dedicated GPU (i.e. replacement for the GT730), or for folks that want the cheapest/smallest/low-power-est GPU encoding for Plex. Or what I want, something for my old WFH PC that can do hardware encoding for WebEx/Teams/Zoom/whatever.
    Reply
  • RedBear87
    Also we see that it purportedly offers PCIe 4.0 x16 support, but the A380 is limited to x8, which would be peculiar.
    I think it's similar to the description on their website for the A380they probably mean that it supports x16 mechanical connections.
    Reply