Intel is having an incredibly rough year — but at long last, the company’s discrete graphics card initiative has produced a card worth celebrating. While we haven’t managed to review it ourselves due to a fluke issue, the $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” GPU launched to nigh-universal praise, has already sold out most everywhere, and Intel tells The Verge it’s working to ship new units every week.
“Demand for Arc B580 graphics cards is high and many retailers have sold through their initial inventory. We expect weekly inventory replenishments of the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card and are working with partners to ensure a steady availability of choices in the market,” Intel spokesperson Mark Anthony Ramirez tells The Verge.
To give you an idea, here are some of the headlines we’ve seen on reviews of this card:
“The new $249 GPU champion has arrived”
“The first worthy budget GPU of the decade”
“The fastest mainstream GPU”
“A New Mainstream King”
“Intel Fixed Its Problems”
Mind you, in some ways the B580 is a glass of ice water in GPU hell, as its primary competition — the RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600 — utterly failed to impress last year, following years of GPU prices that were more inflated than inflation itself. (Linus Tech Tips called the $300 4060 a “wet fart of a GPU” but considers the B580 “great and affordable” now.)
While reviewers have showed the B580 doesn’t beat the 4060 and 7600 in every game, especially for gamers who still play at 1080p resolution, it does seem to pull ahead on average, the drivers seem more mature than Intel’s earlier attempts, and the lower price and generous 12GB of video RAM make it relatively easy to recommend.
If you can find one at $250, that is — which you probably can’t, because they’ve sold out so quickly. For what it’s worth, Hardware Unboxed’s Steve Walton doesn’t think this is a so-called “paper launch” where a manufacturer ships a token number of components for bragging rights instead of mass-producing a product; he said that manufacturers, retailers and distributors told him that supply of the card was “quite substantial.”
That said, AMD and Nvidia’s next GPUs are apparently right around the corner.
Newegg may restock the $250 “Limited Edition” model early next month, according to its listing, and it’s still “coming soon” at B&H. A $279 Acer model is listed as coming to Newegg in as soon as a few days. Some models started at far higher prices: you can still purchase several Gunnir variants from China at around the $400 mark.