Intel’s Arc graphics cards are finally here, or at least they will be in a bit. The company announced that its flagship model, the $329 Arc A770, will be hitting the market next month, quite a while after the low-end A380 made it over here from China. But if even $140 for a GPU is beyond your budget, Intel has made an even cheaper one official: the Arc A310.
With just six Xe cores running at 2000MHz and 4GB of GDDR6 memory, the Arc A310 will probably be outmatched by some of AMD Ryzen’s impressive integrated RDNA 2 graphics. For the sake of comparison the A770, which competes with the likes of the RTX 3060, has 32 Xe cores and 8-16GB of memory. The bottom-rung card is rocking a 64-bit memory bus and 124GB/s bandwidth, both considerably less than the already-low-end A380.
The Intel Arc A310 does support up to four external displays with compatibility up to HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.0 (though the number of physical outputs on the card might be variable), which is fairly impressive for something in this tier. The card doesn’t have an official price or release date beyond “Q3” (which is almost over), but I’d guess it’s slated for somewhere in the $100-120 range. The new entry on Intel’s site was spotted and analyzed by VideoCardz.com. There isn’t even an official image of the specific A310 — just the generic “Arc 3 series” promo image above.
But the A310 probably isn’t intended to show up on actual retail shelves, either physical or digital. You might see one or two of Intel’s partners make a variant for the home system builder on a shoestring budget. I’d guess you’ll see the A310 show up as an unbranded part in budget pre-built desktops, especially small form factor designs, to give their graphics some much-needed punch in comparison to Intel’s integrated Xe and UHD graphics systems.
Sure, it won’t compete with even the cheapest cards from AMD or Nvidia, but it will have just enough juice for companies like Acer or Lenovo to put some 3D game screenshots on the marketing material without technically lying.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.