Newegg has officially showcased its first Arc A380 GPU listing, the first US listing we've seen. The GPU goes on sale on August 22nd for a price of $139.99. This represents the first A380 listing we've seen outside of China, where the GPU originally launched, giving more people a chance to try out Intel's new discrete GPUs. Not that we expect it to be one of the best graphics cards, though the AV1 encoding support might be worth something to some people.
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean we have an official launch window for the rest of Intel's Arc models just yet. Only the Arc A380 has been shown, which was launched in China already. All Intel has done is moved its A380 shipments outside of China.
On the bright side, it appears Intel's confidence is growing with its Arc Alchemist GPU architecture, or at least the A380 variant. We're working to get our hands on a card for review and will be posting our findings, using the latest available drivers, as soon as possible. In theory, Intel wouldn't release the A380 in the United States if there were still groundbreaking bugs needing to be dealt with. Alternatively, A380 is borked so badly that it may never work well enough to warrant further delays. Take your pick.
The card in question is the ASRock Challenger, representing one of the few A380 models we've seen outside of the Gunnir Photon. In contrast to the Gunnir's dual fan design, the ASRock Challenger features a compact single fan cooler design with a matte black finish. The Challenger comes with three DisplayPort 2.0 ports and a single HDMI 2.0b port.
At a price of $139.99, the A380 Challenger is actually competitive in the budget-GPU landscape, slightly undercutting the RX 6400. According to third-party reviews of the A380 (like from Gamers Nexus), the A380 can match the RX 6400, and oftentimes beat it depending on the title. So the GPU can provide a decent value for the money, in the right circumstances.
But circumstances are everything with Intel's Arc GPUs right now. Driver bugs surrounding the GPU cause performance issues as well as some incompatibility problems, and Intel's driver development staff has been working feverishly to fix things. The Arc A380 can deliver RX 6500 XT levels of performance in some games, but get destroyed by the RX 6400 in others — especially older titles running on DX11.
Buyers should be fully aware of Arc's current pitfalls before purchasing. At its current $139 price point, the A380 looks reasonably competitive in the GPU space, but budget cards are typically very poor values to begin with. For instance, the GTX 1630 costs $179, while the far superior GTX 1650 Super costs $199, but that in turn pales in comparison to the RTX 2060 for just $229. Be careful what you buy, in other words, or you just might get exactly what you pay for: a cheap, underperforming GPU.
