Intel ARC A580 8GB Graphics Card Review Featuring Sparkle Orc

Andy Ruffell / 7 months ago

Not everyone has huge amounts of money to blow on their shiny new system or GPU, and while we’d all love to have an RTX 4090 inside our build, we sometimes have to be a bit more humble and look at the modest sub $200 market which is where Intel firmly believe they have some strong contenders including what we’re looking at today, the A580. Priced at just $180, how does it stack up against the likes of AMD and NVIDIA?

So, the A580, name sound familiar? It should because you may remember the name from quite some time ago when Intel first showed the roadmap, and consumers were left thinking that Team Blue had completely ditched the A580 from the lineup until it suddenly started appearing in the last week at certain retail stores.

So what does the A580 bring to the table? Well firstly, you’ll be surprised as to what models of A580 you’ll actually be able to buy. From our own understanding, unlike the Intel branded and Acer models you’ve seen in the past, the A580 will only be available in ASRock and Sparkle branded versions and that’s it. In terms of specs, both the ASRock Challenger OC and Sparkle Orc come in identically with 24 Xe-Cores, 24 Ray Tracing units, a clock speed of 1700MHz, 8GB of GDDR6 and a somewhat modest TDP of 185W.

Now while there isn’t much context for these figures, there’s also not much use comparing them to what AMD and NVIDIA have, because it doesn’t really show much, though with 8GB of memory on a 256-bit memory bus, Intel are already off to a good start when compared to the likes of the RX 7600, RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti, all with their somewhat inferior 128-bit memory bus.

Intel ARC A580

Now when we get sent launch day cards like this one, with it, we get given a driver and some handy reviewer guide material. It gives us the specs, the general rundown on the architecture, and how it compares in their own testing against other cards on the market, and with this, Intel pitted the new A580 against the RTX 3050 from NVIDIA and RX 6600 from AMD, so that’s what we’ll be putting our focus on today, while also including a few other cards to see where it’s positioned.

What makes this most interesting is that the RX 6600 at $209, the RTX 3050 at $229 and even the RX 7600 which is AMD’s lowest-end current-gen part at $239 mean that all of the competition come in more expensive than the newest A580 from Intel, so maybe they are trying to be quite aggressive with their positioning.