A German retailer mistakenly shipped the ASRock Challenger B570 to a PC Games Hardware forum member on December 14 (Credit: Videocardz); however, testing has been limited by the lack of official drivers.
Intel's newly launched Arc Battlemage GPUs are shaking up the budget market, with the Arc B580 beating Nvidia's RTX 4060 while costing less per our extensive review of the card. A lower-specced B570 was also announced, outfitted with 10GB of VRAM and two less Xe Cores at $219. It appears the Arc B570 landed in a user's hands one month before the retail embargo lifts. A
The user managed to brute force-install requisite drivers using Device Manager, ignoring checksum errors and running every .exe file they could find in the driver folder. On rebooting, the GPU was reported as an Arc B580 with 10GB of VRAM and 15 Xe cores, despite the card sporting 18 per Intel's specifications. As the user hasn't reported any crashes or errors thus far, it wouldn't make sense to tinker further with the drivers; if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
Freesync reportedly worked fine in both fullscreen and windowed modes on Windows 10. In addition, the user got World of Warcraft Classic, Deus Ex 3, and 4 up and running but with no performance metrics. As for power draw, with just Mozilla Firefox open in the background, the B570 was seen drawing 10W of power at idle, which is a major improvement over Alchemist. Intriguingly, the once-derided Intel Arc GPUs can run games without official drivers before launch. However, the lack of performance numbers leaves a lot to be desired.
The launch of the Arc B570 was reportedly pushed to January, likely due to supply concerns. The B570 is just a binned-down version of the Arc B580 on the same BMG-21 die. To keep up with the soaring demand, Intel is now offering weekly resupplies of the B580. Availability should improve by CES, when AMD is expected to reveal the budget-oriented Radeon RX 8000 family.
If we go by specifications, the B570 could be 10-15% slower than the B580, landing in RX 6600 XT or Arc A770 territory. For the price, the updated architecture does have its merits, especially when you factor in upcoming technologies like XeSS Frame Generation. Consider waiting for AMD's response to Battlemage next month. However, rumors suggest that the budget-oriented Navi 44 (RX 8600) family might stick with a paltry 8GB VRAM configuration.
