Summary
- Acer just released its own Arc B580 and Arc A380, expanding options for Intel GPU buyers.
- Arc A380 features 8 Xe-cores, 6GB GDDR6 memory, and a reasonable price point, with Acer leading the way.
- Arc B580, with 20 Xe2-cores and 12GB GDDR6 memory, outperforms A380, providing more value for the money in Intel’s lineup.
If you’ve been looking at Intel cards as an alternative to the NVIDIA/AMD duopoly, you might have found that there’s not a whole ton of manufacturers making custom Arc cards. Acer has just revealed a couple of custom Intel cards, though, so your options have widened just a tad bit. And one of them is absolutely tiny.
Acer has just launched a couple of third-party Intel cards—the Acer Nitro Intel Arc B580 and the Acer Nitro Intel Arc A380. The former is the newer-generation Xe2 GPU, while the latter is the older-generation card, but both are still pretty good options.
The Intel Arc A380 was launched in June 2022, but there were never many custom variants. As a reminder, the A380, built on the Alchemist architecture (with a TSMC N6 process), features 8 Xe-cores, 1024 shading units, 6GB of GDDR6 memory on a 96-bit bus, and a graphics clock of 2000 MHz (with boost capabilities up to 2050 MHz or higher depending on the specific model), with a TDP of 75W. So it’s not like it was a particularly bad card by any stretch of the imagination, especially for its intended market segment. It’s not great, but it’s cheap.
The big news here is that this is a low-profile GPU, which means that it should be able to fit in a thinner case without taking up much space. Options for smaller GPUs have dwindled recently, and in fact, they’ve gone the exact opposite way—they now take a considerable amount of space, and it’s something you actually have to think about when buying a PC. This is not the best of the bunch, but it can fit in a lot of cases, even the smaller ones.
The newer Arc B580 was released in December 2024 and utilizes the newer Battlemage architecture (with a TSMC N5 process). It has 20 Xe2-cores, 2560 shading units, but offers a more generous 12GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit bus and significantly higher boost clocks around 2.85 GHz. Despite the fact that we technically have fewer cores, architectural improvements and higher clock speeds allow the B580 to generally outperform the A580, reportedly by up to 30% in some benchmarks.
Acer already sold an SKU of the B580, and this is just another option that comes in a nice white colorway. The A380 SKU is, however, actually new.
If you’ve wanted to check out Intel Arc cards, you had options, including Intel’s own first-party “founders edition” card—marketed as Limited Edition—and a handful from GPU makers including Gunnir and ASRock. Most of the big players have, however, not cared a whole bunch about Intel cards and have stuck with NVIDIA and AMD cards as their main products. I do think Intel deserves more love than what it gets, though. Its cards might not be the best of the bunch right now, but they’re pretty cheap and they provide decent bang for your buck, which is something relatively rare in the GPU world.
Related
Acer did not provide US pricing for these cards, but the Arc B580 costs $319.99 in its black colorway, so this new white one should cost the exact same. We don’t have pricing for the Arc A380 SKU, but it can typically be found for under $200 as it’s a basic budget GPU. As a plus, a lot of the few third-party SKUs that did exist for the Arc A380 were seemingly discontinued or are all out of stock, so Acer would have this cake all for itself.
Source: Acer
