Intel’s Arc graphics cards are finally here, or at least they will be soon. The company has announced that its flagship model, the $329 Arc A770, will hit the market next month, shortly after the low-end A380 arrived here from China. But if even $140 for a GPU is beyond your budget, Intel has made it official even cheaper: the Arc A310.
With just six Xe cores running at 2000MHz and 4GB of GDDR6 memory, the Arc A310 is likely to be trumped by some of AMD Ryzen’s impressive onboard RDNA 2 graphics. For comparison, the A770, which competes with the RTX 3060, has 32 Xe cores and 8-16GB of memory. The low-end card is rocking a 64-bit memory bus and 124GB/s bandwidth, both of which are considerably lower than the already low-end A380.
The Intel Arc A310 supports up to four external displays with compatibility up to HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.0 (although the number of physical outputs on the board can be variable), which is pretty impressive for something at this level. The card doesn’t have an official price or release date beyond “T3” (which is almost gone), but I think it’s slated for something in the $100-120 range. The new entry on the Intel website was identified and reviewed by VideoCardz.com. There’s not even an official image of the specific A310 – just the generic “Arc 3 series” promo image above.
But the A310 is likely not intended to appear on actual retail shelves, whether physical or digital. You might see one or two Intel partners making a variant for the home system builder on a tight budget. I think you’ll see the A310 appear as an unbranded part of budget pre-built desktops, especially small form factor designs, to give graphics a much-needed punch compared to Intel’s Xe and UHD integrated graphics systems.
Sure, it won’t compete with even the cheaper cards from AMD or Nvidia, but it will have enough juice for companies like Acer or Lenovo to put some 3D game screenshots in their marketing material without technically lying.
