Intel Boldly Enter the Mid-tier Graphics Card Segment

Intel has recently released two new graphics cards, the Arc B570 and Arc B580, both targeting the mid-range tiers.

How do they fare? Do they belong in our chart?

The Good

The two new cards are priced well:

• • Arc B570 is $220 (actual price from vendors is $230)
  • Arc B580 is $250 (actual price from vendors is $300-$380)

Even with the vendor markup, these cards are priced better than the competition. At last, there are more alternatives for gamers with reasonable budgets.

And the performance?

• • Arc B570 beats the more expensive RX 6600 XT and RX 6650 XT, as well as the RX 7600 (non-XT). It is also slightly behind the RTX 4060.
  • Arc B580 beats the RTX 4060, and the much more expensive RX 7600 XT.

Power consumption on both new Intel cards is good, leading to great temperatures and noise levels. Overall, both new cards have a lot of good things going for them.

The Meh

When the A750 and A770 cards launched, we took a look and noted how they needed resizeable BAR, which is only available on newer systems. Much time has passed since then, and this is much less of an issue, but it still must be noted: If your system is more than 5 years old and has no resizable BAR, these cards will suffer a performance loss.

The Bad

These cards could have offered really good performance/price, but vendors have added a serious (up to 40%!) markup, making them less of a deal. What is worse is that even though the launches were 1-2 months ago, availability remains spotty. If you can find these cards, and they are priced near MSRP, then they are great. Most of the time? They are out-of-stock or heavily overpriced.

Going Forward

We will be adding the B570 to the Very Good tier, and the B580 to the Great tier of our main PC building chart.

As for the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 XT, those still need a bit of a price adjustment to be logical. What about the very new RTX 5090 and RTX 5080? Those are high-end cards, and they were covered in their own update earlier this week.

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