Quad Intel Arc Pro B70 Battlemage GPUs Pull Up To 720W For Heavy AI Lifting

Our colleagues over at German site HardwareLuxx have posted up their full review of the Arc Pro B70, Intel's long-awaited top-end Battlemage GPU that finally launched last month. As you could guess from the name, the card is focused on workstation and compute use rather than gaming, with a heavy emphasis on AI in Intel's marketing. As a result, only select outlets were sampled cards; however, many of those outlets were actually sampled four cards so that they could test the Project Battlematrix configuration.

Battlematrix is of course Intel's name for a configuration that leverages four or more Intel Arc GPUs. We first saw a Battlematrix configuration when Intel revealed the Arc Pro B60, particularly the unusual Arc Pro B60 Dual cards that sport a pair of BMG-G21 GPUs and 24GB of RAM for each. Nobody seems to have made an Arc Pro B70 Dual yet, but it could certainly be interesting and they seem to be in the works per our interview with Intel's Anil Nanduri, which you can watch here:


We're not going to reprint HardwareLuxx's findings, but the short version is that the site's impressions of the Arc Pro B70 are broadly positive. The card performs very well in synthetic and rendering benchmarks, and it does pretty well in AI, too, although the site remarks that it struggled to find benchmarks which would actually run on more than one of the cards.


In fact, only one benchmark actually worked on multiple cards, and that was LM Studio running under Ubuntu Linux. There, the site observed functional (but sub-linear) scaling across four cards, and also noted that it was possible to run large AI models like Nemotron 3 Super and GPT-OSS-120B with practical performance using all four cards at once. The performance isn't really usable without all four cards, though.

Doing so generates quite a bit of heat, as it happens. The site clocked a single Arc Pro B70 card at just shy of 181W during AI inference, which is actually far below its TDP of 230W for the Intel-branded card. Testing using all four cards apparently ramped power draw in an exactly linear fashion, pulling some 720W during AI inference for the cluster.


That's a fair whack of power, but it's not that much more than you'd pull with something like an RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition, which has a TGP of 600 watts. That card also has 96GB of RAM onboard, which is less than the Battlematrix cards' 128GB combined, but it's still enough to run Nemotron 3 Super in its quantized form; neither setup can handle the full-precision BF16 version, which is over 240GB. Of course, that card also costs some $9500, which is more than double what you'll pay for four Arc Pro B70 cards, so there's not really much of an equivalence here.

HardwareLuxx's review is worth reading in full; even if you don't read German, Google Translate will serve you just fine. It's interesting to see how Intel's new card compares against the AMD and NVIDIA competition. The site says it is planning a follow-up with gaming benchmarks, so head over there to see what a hypothetical Arc B770 GPU would be like if such a thing had ever come out.