Intel’s new Arc GPU gets naked in unsanctioned peep show — B580 has Nvidia Founders Edition-inspired cooler, BGM-G21 die surrounded by 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory

Intel recently revealed the B580 and B570 GPUs, which rival the best graphics cards. Chinese publication MyDrivers has extensively pictured the upcoming Arc Battlemage B580, showing pretty much every inch of the graphics card. The word on the street says reviewers aren’t supposed to show internals until the full review release date.

Although the B580 doesn’t officially release until December 13, Intel has given reviewers some leeway to publish images before full reviews go up on launch day. MyDrivers seems to have taken that permission as far as it can go and has published a complete photo shoot of the B580 inside and out. While Intel has published some renders of the B580, the real thing is much truer to life.

The images show that the B580 Limited Edition doesn’t look all that different from the A750 and A770 Limited Edition models. The card is still dark gray with a matte finish, emblazoned with the ‘Intel Arc’ moniker and the card’s name, and has two run-of-the-mill fans. Intel made a few minor alterations: widening the exhausts at the side of the card and changing the design of the IO plate.

The most significant adjustment Intel made was adding a hole in the backplate, creating another exhaust vent for the cooler. The design was likely inspired by Nvidia’s own Founder’s Edition GPUs, which have sported partial backplates since the RTX 30 series. Intel didn’t go so far as to put the fans on alternating sides; however, it is a design choice that’s still unique to Nvidia cards.

The B580 probably would have run fine without this hole in the backplate, given that the GPU only has a total board power of 190 watts, but it does bode well for higher-end models with greater power draw, should they exist.

Under the hood, the B580 looks like a pretty normal GPU with a copper cold plate on the cooler, thermal pads on the six memory chips and VRMs, and a solitary 8-pin power plug. It is notable, though, how small the PCB is; the cooler is about twice as long as the actual card. That could open the door for small, single-fan models of the B580 and B570, but none of the third-party cards pictured so far sport a single-fan cooler.

The BGM-G21 silicon lies at the center of the small PCB, which contains six Samsung-branded GDDR6 memory chips. The chips are rated for 20 Gbps but only run at 19 Gbps out of the gate. With Battlemage, Intel released Intel Graphics Software, giving users more freedom to finetune their Arc graphics cards. In one of the Intel shared screenshots, we can see the Arc B580 with the option to overclock the VRAM to 22 Gbps.

The Arc B580 will hit the market next week with a $249 price tag. While the pricing looks attractive, we’ll soon see what the B580 brings to the table regarding performance.