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All of our gaming tests are conducted using an Nvidia PCAT v2 device, which allows us to capture total graphics card power, GPU clocks, GPU temperatures, and some other data as we run each gaming benchmark. We'll have separate 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results for each aspect.
Intel gives an official TBP (total board power) rating of 190W for the Arc B580. That's 35W lower than the A770 and A750, but it's also possible for a GPU to come in above or below its official rating. With the PCAT, we can see precisely where the B580 ends up. And the good news is that it often comes in quite a bit lower than to official TBP.
On average, the B580 used 142W at 1080p medium, 147W at 1080p ultra, 156W at 1440p, and 163W at 4K. As you'd expect, power use typically increases at higher settings and resolutions. Some games tend to be less demanding of the GPU overall, helping to bring the average down, but none of the games consistently exceeded the 190W TBP rating.
Compared to the RTX 4060, though, Arc B580 isn't exactly the most efficient GPU around. Nvidia's Ada Lovelace GPUs have proven to be excellent on power use, so in terms of performance per watt the RTX 4060 still easily beats the competition. The B580 does better than AMD's RX 7600 XT, but that's also on a less advanced TSMC N6 node rather than Battlemage's N5.
Clock speeds among the different GPUs and architectures aren't particularly important, but it's interesting to see how things have changed. Nvidia's RTX 30-series and earlier tended to top out at around 1.9 GHz, and AMD's RX 5000-series and earlier clocked even lower. But then AMD broke the 2 GHz barrier with RDNA 2 and everyone else followed.
Intel's A-series GPUs all maxed out at around 2.4 GHz. With Battlemage, the limit is quite a bit higher at 2,850 MHz max — and overclocking can push that even higher. Intel indicated that with higher power limits, more voltage, and a bump in clock speed that around 3.1 GHz might be possible on a lot of the B580 chips. Now we have to wonder when factory stock GPUs will start to break the 3 GHz barrier.
Note also that the B580 appears to be limited by the reference boost clock rather than by power. There are some games where it gets closer to a power limit, but nearly everything in our test suite ran at a steady 2850 MHz.
Like the clock speeds, comparing GPU temperatures without considering other aspects of the cards doesn't make much sense. One card could run its fans at higher RPMs, generating more noise while being "cooler." So these graphs should be used alongside the noise and performance results.
The Arc B580 Limited Edition runs at reasonable temperatures for our test environment. We've seen cooler running cards, like the Asus RTX 4060 Dual we've used for these tests, but not by much. As we'll see next, the low temperatures are backed by low noise levels, so Intel has created a very nice reference card design.
We check noise levels using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter placed 10cm from the card, with the mic aimed right at the center of one fan: the center fan if there are three fans, or the right fan for two fans. This helps minimize the impact of other noise sources like the fans on the CPU cooler. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment is around 31–32 dB(A).
[Charts to come, sorry! Still testing...]
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