Intel has been talking a lot about its future discrete graphics cards for desktop PCs in recent months but has yet to present them in person—at least until now. Today, the chip maker demonstrated its Arc Alchemist 700-series board, powered by the ACM-G10 GPU, at the Intel Extreme Masters pro-gaming tournament in Texas.
The card that Intel demonstrated at IEM is known as the Intel Arc Limited Edition. Consider the demonstration official because it was shot and Tweeted by Bryce GfxDriverGuru, an Intel Arc Community Advocate. Intel unveiled a rendering of its Arc Limited Edition graphics board in March, revealing some key features of the hardware.
First and foremost, we know that the board is built on the ‘large’ Arc Alchemist GPU known as the ACM-G10 and has up to 32 Xe cores. Second, we know that the graphics processor is accompanied by 16GB of GDDR6 RAM. Finally, there are four DisplayPorts and one HDMI port on the board.
Intel didn’t provide clarity as to which Arc Alchemist GPU model is used in Arc Limited Edition
One of the unanswered questions concerning the Arc Limited Edition is if it uses the Arc Alchemist A770 or A780 GPU model. The latter is the faster of the two, but even our friends at VideoCardz, who like to keep their ears close to the ground, don’t appear to know whether it’ll be used on the Limited Edition model.
The Intel Arc Limited Edition, as the name suggests, will be sold under the Intel brand and in limited quantities. The board features a dual-slot, dual-fan cooling system, as well as eight-pin and six-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors that can deliver up to 225W of power in total (in addition to the 75W delivered by the PCIe x16 slot itself), indicating that the card is not as hot or power-hungry as flagship solutions from AMD and Nvidia.
Intel has not yet disclosed suggested retail prices for its Arc Alchemist A700-series desktop graphics cards. However, if its flagship A770/A780 models are to compete against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 or RTX 3080 boards, they must be competitively priced.
And, with the price of existing graphics cards falling rapidly month after month, the longer Intel waits to deploy its cards, the lower that price will almost certainly have to be if it intends to capture a significant share of the gaming GPU market.
also read:
