Some gamers appear to be receiving their Intel Battlemage graphics cards a few days ahead of the sales embargo. A couple of card orders were delivered this week, instead of on Dec. 13. That’s when Intel is planning for the second generation of its Arc GPUs to go on sale.
According to Videocardz.com, a gamer purchased a Sparkle Arc B580 Titan OC Edition from a retailer in Poland and ended up receiving the card days before the sales embargo is to lift. Naturally, they took to Reddit with photos. It appears that another gamer also posted photos there of an ASRock Arc B580 Challenger 12GB OC, which was also delivered early. We think we’re probably not alone in wishing this sort of thing would happen to us.
Obviously, there’s no word from the retailers on how this happened, but it seems likely that the gamers are the beneficiaries of employee mistakes. Unfortunately for the few who have Battlemage cards in hand right now, drivers aren’t available yet for the masses.
The Sparkle Arc B580 Titan OC Edition looks like a very physically tough graphics card, with its large fan enclosure (it has three fans) and metal backplate. It also sports some blue lighting and a little GPU holder. Sparkle puts the card’s clock speed at 2.74GHz, which is also the ASRock Arc B580 Challenger 12GB OC’s clock. Intel puts the standard clock for the B580 at 2.67GHz.
Intel Arc B580
Credit: Intel
Information about Battlemage has been dripping out for a while, and we learned much more when Intel officially unveiled its own Arc B580 Limited Edition card on Dec. 3. That card is expected to go for $249 while it lasts; Intel isn’t getting into the card business. In addition to cards from ASRock, Intel, and Sparkle, expect to see B580s from Acer, Gunnir, and Maxsun on (or soon after) Dec. 13.
The big question about Intel’s second generation of Arc GPUs is whether the B580 will provide a viable alternative to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600. It’s too early to say with certainty, but leaked benchmarks suggest that the B580 could indeed be a contender. If that’s the case, we could have a third major player in the gaming GPU segment, which will be good news for gamers on a budget.
For now, everyone needs to sit tight until we have more benchmark results to check out. When those numbers come in, be sure to pay attention to game benchmarks as well as the synthetics.