Gaming hardware YouTuber ETA Prime's has posted a demonstration of "the world's first-ever single-slot Intel Arc A380". Now of course, this isn't an actual single-slot A380— instead, ETA PRIME utilized a near-identical single-slot Arc A310 cooler on his previously dual-slot Arc A380. Since both Intel Arc cards were from Sparkle, the coolers ended up being basically interchangeable.
The subsequent testing of the functioning single-slot Intel Arc A380 was done inside a Minisforum MS-01, which has a dedicated PCIe slot but only has room for a single-slot GPU, like the Intel Arc A310 and ETA Prime's modded Arc A380.
ETA Prime's Minisforum MS-01 has been specced out with an Intel Core i9-13900H, 32GB of DDR5-5200 RAM, the Intel Arc A380 was able to be pushed to a stable 54 Watts, with a 1936 MHz Memory clock and up to 1900 MHz GPU clock. This managed a stable 60-80 FPS in Helldivers II, Palworld, Mortal Kombat 1, Cyberpunk 2077, Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, and Borderlands 3, all at Low-to-Medium settings at 1080p. Helldivers, Cyberpunk and MK1 were tested with XeSS enabled.
God of War (2018), a port of a PS4 title, was also benchmarked at "Original" settings and still achieved above 60 FPS. For your reference, the same title was capped to 30 FPS on PlayStation 4 and only delivered about ~45 FPS in its Performance Mode on PS4 Pro.
So, a single slot-Intel Arc A380 pulling out passable 60 FPS performance in current-gen and cross-gen titles in such a small form factor is an expensive alternative to console gaming— the pricing of these mini PCs will still be more than a PlayStation 5.
When comparing the size of mini PCs like this to consoles, the overall volume of the computing package contained within the Minisforum MS-01 here is 1.77 liters, which is ultra-compact. Compared to the 10.5 liters of the PlayStation 5 or even the 2.63 liters of the Xbox Series S, 1.77 liters is almost nothing! Even most proper Mini ITX PC cases are a lot bigger than this, though of course a full Mini ITX build also gets you fully-specced CPUs and GPUs— which you don't get with ultra compact SFF PCs like Minisforums'.
Overall, it's not a bad showing from any party involved— though the practicality of projects involving swapping GPU coolers is, as always, questionable at best. Hopefully Sparkle sees this project as an incentive to go ahead and start shipping low-profile Arc A380s, though— since the cards clearly already work and have the needed components.
