Intel Arc A580 Review: New Budget Contender

The Intel Arc A580 is finally here. First announced in 2022, we initially expected to see the card go on sale in early 2023. But then the months ticked by, pricing on the Arc A750 dropped, and we wondered if the final Intel Arc Alchemist desktop offering had simply been canned. Wonder no longer! It's here, and it still has some tricks that can help it compete against the best graphics cards.

Our sample for this review comes via Sparkle. There will also be Arc A580 cards from ASRock and Gunnir (the latter being limited to Asian markets). Maybe a few other graphics card manufacturers will start selling the A580 in the future, but Intel won't be making its own brand "Limited Edition" card — and it has discontinued the A770 LE and A750 LE.

Functionally, the Arc A580 looks very much like the A750 and A770 8GB. The key difference is that four additional Xe-Cores have been disabled, along with the accompanying shaders and XMX units. But it still has the full 256-bit memory interface, with the same 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM as the earlier Arc offerings. We can't help but wonder what a 12GB, 192-bit interface Arc might have looked like in terms of performance, but that's not to be, at least not on desktop.

In theory, the Arc A750 has a $249 MSRP — it was reduced not too long after launch to make it more attractive. The problem that the A580 faces is that current street prices on the A750 are as low as $190, just $10 more than the launch price of the A580. For example, there's a Sparkle Arc A750 for $189.99 on Amazon, or if you prefer, there's an ASRock Arc A750 for $199.99 on Amazon. Either way, you're getting 17% more shaders and compute for just 6–11 percent more money.

We've seen the A750 at $200 or less for a couple of months now, so these prices shouldn't be a surprise to Intel or its partners. Assuming supply holds, we'd expect street prices on the A580 to drop another $20–$30 to compensate. Because prices really need to fall to make this a better deal than the A750.

It's not just Arc A750 that the A580 needs to beat, however. Nvidia's cheapest RTX cards are the RTX 3050 and RTX 3060, priced at $216 and $250, respectively. The A580 should easily beat the 3050, at least on performance (not on power), but the 3060 offers entry into the Nvidia ecosystem and better overall performance. There's also the newer RTX 4060, starting at $290, which also warrants a look. Nvidia costs more, in other words, but some will feel it's worth the cost.

From AMD, the closest competitor is the RX 6600 (non-XT) which has been on sale for as little as $180 in recent months. Currently, the best price we can find is $200, so Intel wins again on pricing... but what about performance? And drivers? And power use? Those are all important factors, which we'll cover in a moment.

Again, the biggest hurdle that the A580 faces right now is going to be the A750. Until or unless prices change, there's almost no reason to save $10 to get the A580. If you're willing to take a chance on Intel Arc — the drivers still aren't quite as reliable as AMD and Nvidia drivers, though they continue to improve — why not opt for higher performance?

There aren't many other benefits besides the additional compute, however. Both the A580 and A750 offer 8GB of GDDR6 16Gbps memory on a 256-bit interface. Both have the same video outputs, AV1 encoding/decoding support, etc. On paper, the A580 has a slightly lower 185W TBP (total board power), but the Sparkle card at least comes with two 8-pin connectors. It certainly doesn't need them, as peak power use throughout our test suite was under 210W, but the Orc OC does exceed the base power.

Clock speeds are also an interesting point of discussion. Intel officially lists a Game Clock of just 1.7 GHz on the A580, compared to 2050 MHz on the A750. But the maximum boost clock of the A750 and A770 appears to be 2.4 GHz. What about the boost clock on the A580? Well, Intel doesn't officially give that information, but on the Sparkle Orc OC, we consistently saw clocks of 2300–2400 MHz. That means it ends up a lot closer to the A750 than the paper specs might otherwise indicate. (This is why we list the boost clock rather than the game clocks for the AMD and Intel GPUs.)

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