Intel Arc B770 GPU Spotted With A 300W TDP To Rival AMD And NVIDIA

Put your wallet away; it's another leak post, not an official announcement. However, maybe keep the billfold in arm's reach, because it's looking like it won't be long now before we see Intel's "Big Battlemage" GPU. The latest leak comes from familiar face "X86 is dead&back", who actually deleted his post, but not before we and many others saw what he spotted: shipping logs of what appear to be cooling apparatus meant for 300W GPUs. See for yourself:


How do we know this has anything to do with Intel? Well, it's because of the board descriptor. Intel's GPUs typically use codes just like the highlighted N38341 code in the picture above to describe the PCB designs. As an example, here's a photo of our Arc B580 Limited Edition card, sporting a number in the exact same format:


So it's almost a given that these are for an unnamed Intel GPU with a TDP of up to 300W. What do we know about that would fit that bill? Well, certainly not any extant chip Intel is currently selling. The BMG-G31 GPU could fit the bill, though; by our estimates just the other day, we came up with a likely TDP of 270W for the new GPU, assuming it is still fabbed on TSMC's N5 process. A cooler intended for 300W could certainly take care of a chip producing 270W of heat.

There are other details in this shipping data that make it interesting, though. There are three entries; two of them are from September, while one is from mid-October. The previous two entries explicitly say "FOR R&D PURPOSE," meaning that they weren't necessarily related to any marketable product, but the new entry says no such thing.

Does that mean Intel is about to stealth-launch 300W Battlemage GPUs? No, not necessarily—but it's certainly a possibility. Intel's got an uphill battle to fight at the 300W power level, though. On AMD, that's the top-end Radeon RX 9070 XT, while NVIDIA's offering the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti at 300W. Both cards are a huge leap in performance from the BMG-G21-based Arc B580; unless Intel has made some major architectural improvements in BMG-G31, it's going to have to be priced pretty aggressively against the competition. We might find out at CES.