As of this week, the best-selling
workstation GPU on popular PC products retailer Newegg isn't from one of the usual suspects AMD or NVIDIA. Instead, Intel has secured the crown by nailing a key, neglected budget segment in the workstation GPU market with its
Intel Arc Pro B50. This remarkable achievement, first spotted by @
Haze2K1 on Twitter, sees Intel gaining a meaningful chunk of the workstation graphics market once thought to be owned entirely by NVIDIA. So, how did Intel manage such an achievement, pulling ahead of the
PNY Quadro RTX 4000 Ada generation of cards? It might have something to do with the fact that it essentially matches the performance of NVIDIA's
Quadro RTX 2000 Ada, a GPU starting at $723 that often costs even more than that, or that it's about a quarter of the price of NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 Ada cards.
All told, this is not only an impressive performance showing from Intel Arc GPUs in the workstation space, it's also a key victory for Intel in terms of pricing for performance. When you take the comparison even farther and look at the Intel Arc Pro B50 compared to other entry-level options from NVIDIA, like the Quadro RTX A1000 starting at roughly ~$400, the sheer gap in performance and value becomes rapidly apparent. On YouTube, Level1Techs benchmarked these two GPUs against each other in synthetics and even gaming, showing a blow-out victory in favor of Intel Arc.
At this point, we think it's fair to say that Intel's Arc Pro B50 has lived up to the hype Intel drummed up for its
May announcement at Computex. The pricing does seem to be slightly higher than the original estimated MSRP of just $299, but this price point has still proven to be competitive enough to surge Intel Arc Pro B50 to the top of Newegg's workstation GPU best sellers list, and is hopefully a sign of more healthy competition in the workstation space to come. God knows workstation users need
that competition— those prices are even more egregious than what consumers deal with.
On the note of consumer GPUs though, the
Intel Arc B770 may also be imminent. If its as competitive among consumer GPUs as the Arc Pro B50 has proven in the workstation GPU space, gamers may also have some nice market competition to look forward to. Time will tell.
In the meantime, we found a few alternatives and the actual Arc Pro B50 right here:
