Positioning & Architecture
Just yesterday we published our review of the Intel reference design B580 card, today we're posting the reviews for custom designs. Besides this review (ASRock B580 Steel Legend), we also have a review up for the Sparkle B580 Titan OC. With the B580, Intel is releasing the entry-level model of their product stack first, I suspect higher end models like B770 will follow in 2025. This gives them more time to optimize and fix possible driver issues, and I'm sure they're also waiting for what AMD and NVIDIA are announcing next year. At the same time, they are able to put graphics cards under gamers' Xmas trees, at highly competitive sub-$300 pricing.

ASRock's Arc B580 Steel Legend is a factory-overclocked custom design version of B580. It comes with an OC to 2800 MHz GPU frequency, which is a +4.9% OC. You also get adjustable RGB lighting and a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution, at a price of $270, which is a +$20 increase over the Intel baseline price.

From an architectural standpoint, Intel has implemented numerous modifications to enhance GPU efficiency, particularly to ensure that hardware units are utilized more effectively and don't have to wait for data from other units in the pipeline. As expected, not only the rasterization parts of the chip have been improved, the ray tracing units got some special love and are now much more powerful, offering up to twice the throughput. Last but not least, the XMX matrix math AI engines have been upgraded—so the new XeSS Frame Generation can yield best results.

Performance
This review marks the debut of our 2025.1 GPU Test System, which is now built on AMD technology with the outstanding Ryzen 7 9800X3D. We've updated to Windows 11 24H2, complete with the newest patches and updates, and have added a selection of new games. At 1080p Full HD, the new Arc B580 is a whopping 42% faster than last generation's A580—very impressive. Compared to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060, the performance uplift is 5%, compared to AMD RX 7600 the card is almost 15% ahead. AMD's RX 7600 XT is 4% slower than the B580, but considerably more expensive at the same time. If you have more money to spend, then something like RTX 4060 Ti can offer higher FPS (+21%), RX 7700 XT (+33%), but these cards cost almost $400, while Arc B580 goes for just $250.

Interestingly, and despite the claims of a factory overclock, we're only seeing very meager performance gains from the ASRock B580 Steel Legend when compared to the Intel reference design. The Relative Performance chart doesn't even show this at all, because it only has integer percent values. When looking at the FPS averages, we get 82.9 FPS vs 82.6 FPS, or +0.3%—basically nothing. All three resolutions show this 0.3% difference fairly consistently, so it doesn't look like random variation (only). Digging deeper, I looked at the actual clock frequencies in gaming, and they are pretty much identical. The same is happening with the Sparkle B580 Titan OC, so I suspect it's a peculiarity of the Intel Battlemage design, maybe even some sort of bug.

At higher resolution, the B580 does gain a few percentage points compared to the rest of the market, which is a good sign that the bigger Battlemage cards will be very interesting. This also explains why Intel is marketing the card for 1440p, to show these bigger gains. In my opinion the B580 is a great choice for 1080p Full HD—you'll be able to play most titles at ultra settings at native resolution without RT. For 1440p, you'd have to either sacrifice settings, use upscaling, or both—which is still not unreasonable. For me, that's too many compromises though to really recommend the card for 1440p.

VRAM
While both RTX 4060 and RX 7600 have "only" 8 GB VRAM, Intel offers 12 GB on the B580, which is the right choice for this segment. AMD's product stack includes the RX 7600 XT with 16 GB, which is overkill and prices the card out of the range of the B580 ($310 vs $250). Our benchmark results take the VRAM difference into account, and it's important to highlight that more VRAM will not magically make every game run faster. As long as a game's VRAM usage is low enough, the extra memory won't make any difference. Future games will probably use more VRAM, but that trajectory is limited by the VRAM sizes on game consoles. Games are developed first for consoles, and it's quite rare to see developers go the extra mile for greatly improved visuals on PC. Rather 2024 was full of poor PC ports, and considering the issues we saw, "better textures if lots of VRAM" is quite low on the list. Extra VRAM does come in handy when ray tracing or frame generation are used, which are both problematic for cards like RX 7600 8 GB and RTX 4060 8 GB.

Ray Tracing
Intel's architecture has improved ray tracing support, and it definitely runs faster than what AMD offers. Compared to NVIDIA RTX 4060, at least at 1080p, the green team still has the upper hand. Once you run at 1440p though, all the competing 8 GB cards lose steam, because they are running out of VRAM. In this scenario the Arc B580 can even beat the much more expensive NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB, the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB remains well ahead, but is almost twice as expensive ($425 vs $250). I'm still not convinced that RT is worth it in this segment, especially when you're fighting to reach 60 FPS in the first place. Sure, you can turn on upscaling and frame generation, but is the loss in image quality worth the RT eye candy? On the other hand, there are lighter games that run very well with RT off, like F1 24, here enabling RT could make sense. I still don't think it's the most important capability in this segment.

Upscaling & Frame Generation
NVIDIA's biggest selling point for the GeForce 40 Series is its support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which promises to double the frame rates. Such performance gains are a significant benefit, allowing you to enable ray tracing at no extra performance cost or to game at higher resolutions, or simply reach playable FPS with a cheaper card. However, this feature isn't available universally and requires game support, most high-profile AAA titles do support it. AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation is available on many new releases, and it works on Intel hardware, too. With this generation, Intel is finally introducing their own version of frame generation, called XeSS Frame Generation. At this time, the technology is only available as beta preview in F1 24, but I'm positive that Intel will convince all the major studios to add XeSS Frame Generation in their games. My confidence comes from the observation that XeSS upscaling has been included in almost every game that supports more than one upscaler, provided they aren't sponsored games that are restricted to a single upscaler tech.

Still, at the end of the day, NVIDIA's DLSS 3 technology, for both upscaling and frame generation is the gold standard, because it is the most mature tech, with the best image quality and game support. Unfortunately it is available for NVIDIA cards only, while FSR and XeSS will run on all cards. Intel's XeSS Frame Generation uses the XMX Matrix cores available in Battlemage, Alchemist and Lunar Lake, so it will not run on older GPUs and iGPUs.

Physical Design, Heat & Noise
ASRock's B580 Steel Legend comes with an excellent cooling solution that's the most powerful of all the three cards that we've tested. It's also the biggest one—three slots, 30 cm in length—it should still fit in most cases. The bigger cooler gives ASRock more cooling surface to work with and also more mass to absorb heat. Temperatures are excellent, reaching just 61°C and noise levels are exceptional, too—only 24 dBA, which is whisper quiet. Our apples-to-apples heatsink comparison test confirms, at the same heat load and noise level, the Steel Legend will run 15°C cooler than the Intel dual-slot reference cooler. While comparing the PCB designs, I noticed that ASRock has switched from using costly high-end VRM components from Monolithic to more budget-friendly ones from A&O. Pricing is crucial in this market segment, and the A770's price was constrained by the expensive VRM components. In contrast, the B580 seems to be properly designed with this segment in mind and looks like it could sell for $200 or less.

While there was no idle fan-stop on the A-Series, Intel has made this capability standard with the B-Series—the fans will turn off in idle, desktop productivity, media playback and internet browsing. Unfortunately, the fans do spin up every few seconds, which can be quite distracting, because the human ear is much more sensitive to changes in noise. I'm not even sure why this is happening, it looks more like a bug than a feature, hopefully it's something that Intel can fix.

PCIE x8 and Resizable BAR
Just like last generation, Arc Battlemage is specified as "requires PCIe Resizable BAR." While there was some controversy about that in 2022, in 2024, that's a very reasonable requirement. Virtually every motherboard supports this configuration, and it's enabled by default, so novice users won't have to deal with manual setting changes.

While the B580 cards use a physical x16 connector, only eight lanes are connected to the GPU. This matches what AMD and NVIDIA have been doing with RX 7600 and RTX 4060. Cutting the number of lanes in half reduces chip design complexity in the GPU's PCIe interface, which means smaller die size, which lowers fabrication cost. The tradeoff is around 2% in gaming performance, an acceptable compromise in my opinion.

Power Consumption
For Battlemage, Intel has contracted TSMC to fabricate their GPU chips, using a modern 5 nanometer production process. This, paired with the improvements in GPU architecture design, helps bring power consumption down considerably. ASRock has equipped their Steel Legend with a second 8-pin power input, which brings the theoretical power delivery capability to 375 W. The VRM design is identical with the Intel reference card, but ASRock has increased the board's power limit a bit. For most workloads this doesn't matter, Furmark clearly shows an increase though: 217 W vs 195 W. Typical gaming is actually a little bit better than on the Intel card, reaching 178 W. This makes the card much more energy efficient than A770 (235 W), and it even beats the 198 W of the RX 7600 XT. RX 7600 uses 25 W less, 154 W, which isn't a major difference to the B580. GeForce RTX 4060 on the other hand is clearly more efficient, with just 128 W under load. It's still not a dealbreaker because the power consumption cost isn't big enough, and the Intel cooler design can handle the increased heat output very well, with minimal noise.

What is problematic though is the high power consumption in idle and non-gaming states. We measured 38 W, which is simply too much for any graphics card in 2024. Competing products do much better here: RTX 4060: 14 W, RX 7600 XT: 4 W, RX 7600: 2 W (!) What's really disappointing for me is that Intel knew about this since Arc A-Series was launched in late 2022, and they didn't bother fixing it. VRAM is still running at full speed, no matter if the card is sitting idle or fully loaded—competitors had low-clocked idle states since forever. Intel's official answer is to enable ASPM power management, which is default off on virtually all desktop systems, so users are required to go into their BIOS and change a setting that they might have never heard of. On top of that, the Windows power profile has to be manually tweaked from the default to "Maximize energy savings," nested several levels deep in the legacy power profiles. We still took the time to measure the effect of ASPM and can confirm that it helps lower single-monitor idle power consumption to 10 W, which is good. Multi-monitor and media playback are still sky-high with 39 W and 41 W respectively.

Media Codecs & Display Connectivity
Arc Battlemage has excellent support for modern codecs, basically everything is there, including hardware-accelerated encode for AV1, H.264 and H.265. While that is certainly nice to have, for the vast majority of users it won't make much of a difference. All streaming services have several fallbacks, in case a codec is not supported, so you're fine even with older hardware. Also, all modern iGPUs and discrete GPUs have support for AV1 decode, just encode varies a bit. Unless you're a creator or want to publish gameplay, even hardware without AV1 encode acceleration will be fine, and something like H.265 or H.264 is good enough, too. The same is true for connectivity, sure 4K up to 360 Hz is awesome, but in this segment, most people will be using 1080p Full HD or 1440p.

Overclocking
Intel has made major upgrades to Battlemage's overclocking capabilities, and built a fully-featured package. Users can now modify memory frequency, voltages and the GPU's voltage-frequency curve. The fan curve is also adjustable through an exceptionally well-designed interface that I really like. While the UI shines, the backend is problematic. There are still a lot of issues with manual OC, your journey to maximize OC potential will be filled with crashes, reboots, driver reinstalls etc. The overall performance gains are OK, we gained around 7% in real-life performance, which isn't that much, but better than nothing.

Drivers & Game Support
Despite being the youngest vendor of discrete graphics cards, Intel's driver team has been performing very well. They are consistently releasing game ready drivers ahead of major and minor game releases, beating AMD regularly, sometimes even NVIDIA. This strong release cadence has been going on for well over a year, so there's no reason to assume they'll slow down with Battlemage. During testing, I encountered some small issues in games, Intel released a fixed driver within days. To me, it looks like Intel is aware that drivers and software are an essential piece of the product and that they are allocating the proper resources for it.

Pricing & Alternatives
Priced at $250, the Arc B580 comes at outstanding pricing. Competing options are considerably more expensive or offer lower performance, or both. The strongest competitor is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, no doubt. The cheapest 4060 sells for $300—$50 more than the Arc. In return, you get support for DLSS 3 for upscaling and frame generation, much better energy efficiency, and everything else NVIDIA offers that makes them the industry leader. Still, a $50 price increase is quite a lot of money, especially in this segment. AMD's Radeon RX 7600 non-XT is $250, same as Arc B580, but it comes with smaller VRAM of 8 GB, 13% lower performance, but much better idle power usage—I'm not convinced and would probably lean towards buying a B580. AMD does offer the RX 7600 XT with 16 GB VRAM, but at $310 it's much too expensive for the minimal gains it offers, and still can't match B580. If money is tight, AMD's previous-generation RX 6600 XT and 6650 XT could be options, but these generally lack the performance for decent 1080p gaming at highest details. RTX 3060 Ti is around $300 these days, I'd prefer a 4060 over that any day—for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB is a little bit faster than the new Intel card, but much too expensive at $380, and its 8 GB VRAM buffer could end up a bottleneck in some games. Overall, Intel's new card is in an excellent position to capture market share in this high-volume segment.

The ASRock B580 Steel Legend is listed for $270, which is a $20 increase over the Intel reference card price. In return, you get a much better cooler that runs exceptionally quiet. The factory overclock didn't turn into tangible performance, but you get great ARGB support. Still, asking $20 extra for that is problematic in this segment, because at that point you're getting quite close to competing cards—$10 would be a no-brainer, $20 will make you think twice.

Future Releases
This leadership position might not last though, because both AMD and NVIDIA are expected to announce new products at CES Las Vegas in January. No doubt, NVIDIA will set new records for performance, and they'll certainly introduce new software features, maybe new DLSS—but they will make you pay for it. I also have serious doubts if they will even care about the sub-$300 segment, maybe even sub-$350, and I'm not sure if RTX 5060 is even launching any time soon. AMD on the other hand could be willing to undercut Intel to clear existing inventory of the RX 7600 series, to make up room for new Navi 4x-based models. Whether these will be priced competitively and whether they can significantly improve the performance in this price segment remains to be seen.

I think Intel did consider this, which is why they are launching now. I think they also understand that their pricing must be good enough for people to overlook some shortcomings in the product, and they have enough margins left to bring pricing down even further. It'll also be interesting to see what they have in store with B750 and B770. If you need a new GPU for Christmas, do consider the Arc B580. If you can wait, see what gets announced next month, maybe it can help push pricing down on the GPU market, even though that does seem a bit unlikely with hardware prices always going up all the time.