ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend 12GB "Battlemage" Graphics Card Pictured

[btarunr]

FunkyIT scored an ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend 12 GB "Battlemage" graphics card that they previewed on their channel. The card appears fairly large, considering that Intel is positioning the B580 to be an upper-mid range GPU, if we go by the naming convention of the previous "Alchemist" generation, and the A580. The ASRock Steel Legend product features a large, aluminium dual fin-stack cooler featuring a trio of fans, and what looks like a metallic, dual-tone cooler shroud and backplate combo. The PCB underneath is a little over half the length of the card, which means nearly half the heatsink's airflow passes through the card and out large cutouts in the backplate.

The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, a combination rated for up to 375 W power delivery. Previous leaks suggest that the ASRock B580 Steel Legend features RGB lighting in the form of a large Steel Legend ornament on top of the card, and the three fans each feature RGB LED lighting. FunkyIT also showed off the retail box of the card. There's no change in the Intel Arc main branding, but attention is given to the Intel XeSS technology logo, which mentions "AI Upscaling." The XMX cores, which are the main AI acceleration hardware on discrete Arc GPUs, get their own separate branding on the box. Intel isn't just going after gamers, but also creators, and AI acceleration markets. "Play, Create, Generate," reads the box.



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[Onasi]

This seems like an excessive power setup and cooling for what is, I would assume, a lower mid-range card. Hopefully, it’s not a sign that Battlemage is going to be as inefficient as Alchemist, but… we’ll see.

 

[AleXXX666]

This seems like an excessive power setup and cooling for what is, I would assume, a lower mid-range card. Hopefully, it’s not a sign that Battlemage is going to be as inefficient as Alchemist, but… we’ll see.

excessive is always better than "underpowered". But, the price could be "excessive" too..

 

[Dristun]

This seems like an excessive power setup and cooling for what is, I would assume, a lower mid-range card. Hopefully, it’s not a sign that Battlemage is going to be as inefficient as Alchemist, but… we’ll see.

Counterpoint: It's amazing to have these options in midrange now because people building low/mid PCs can have a quiet card now too. If someone still wants to save every dollar and listen to their coolers 24/7, Palit and Gigabyte still have them covered with complete garbage entry-level models.
Now, in my perfect world, these big coolers would come without RGB and ugly plastic designs while retaining their size and costing $10-15 less, but that's just me dreaming.

 

[Onasi]

@Dristun
Counter-counterpoint - since vendors margins are really tight at this price-bracket, the pricing on these quieter models often gets out of hand and makes them essentially unappealing to buyers who are rather price-conscious in this segment. Quiet and cool is all well and good, but if it essentially adds enough to cards cost that it moves it a tier higher, well, that usually doesn’t end up working out financially.
And yeah, I agree, potentially just building a no-frills, but effective cooler and just asking a tad more over MSRP would be the optimal solution for customers, but, well, as I said, vendors want to improve their margins.
In any case, point I was making was less about the card itself and more me wondering whether BM will turn out to be a shitshow in terms of efficiency once again like Alchemist. I really don’t think a card of this tier should require two 8-pins.

 

[Nostras]

@Dristun
Counter-counterpoint - since vendors margins are really tight at this price-bracket, the pricing on these quieter models often gets out of hand and makes them essentially unappealing to buyers who are rather price-conscious in this segment. Quiet and cool is all well and good, but if it essentially adds enough to cards cost that it moves it a tier higher, well, that usually doesn’t end up working out financially.
And yeah, I agree, potentially just building a no-frills, but effective cooler and just asking a tad more over MSRP would be the optimal solution for customers, but, well, as I said, vendors want to improve their margins.
In any case, point I was making was less about the card itself and more me wondering whether BM will turn out to be a shitshow in terms of efficiency once again like Alchemist. I really don’t think a card of this tier should require two 8-pins.

If the 175W TGP is correct this card's cooler looks to be absurdly overkill. Agreed with everything you said pm.

 

[wNotyarD]

If the 175W TGP is correct this card's cooler looks to be absurdly overkill. Agreed with everything you said pm.

Knowing how AIBs work, it's likely they designed the cooler with more powerful cards in mind and simply couldn't care to design completely a lesser solution (just adapt the cold plate) within the same line, in this case the Steel Legend. There should be a smaller Challenger for the B5xx cards, and possibly a bigger Taichi for B7xx.

 

[_roman_]

Someone who knows his stuff. And is very smart to make pictures for that card. Keeps the protection plastic in the display connectors. HDMI and DP looks basically the same with those protection dongles.

 

[ZoneDymo]

anyone else feels this is just made htis big to appeal to the...lowest common denominator?

 

[watzupken]

Wow, 2 power connectors on a mid end tier card is not a good sign. This is supposed to compete/outpace the RTX 4060 Ti which sips power. If the B580 uses this much power, I have concerns around power requirements for the higher end 7xx series.

 

[Ruru]

Having two 8-pin connectors doesn't mean that the card will have a 375W consumption. I don't understand the panic here.

 

[Kraust]

Wow, 2 power connectors on a mid end tier card is not a good sign. This is supposed to compete/outpace the RTX 4060 Ti which sips power. If the B580 uses this much power, I have concerns around power requirements for the higher end 7xx series.

Mid-ranged cards have historically had 6+8. I'm not sure what is out of the ordinary here. A lot of theories is that this is a 225W card which would line up, and if it performs at 4060Ti levels of performance then it would fall between Nvidia and AMD when it comes to power draw at this perf.

More that I think about it the more that I think the B580 could perform in line with the 7700XT (at $150 less!). From what we know they appear to have similar performance profiles but would mean it over performs the 2060Ti by quite a bit and may likely by why they are pushing this card out first.