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ASRock Challenger Intel Arc B570: $219 MSRP
Intel's even more cost-friendly Arc B570 Battlemage GPU brings strong feature support like XeSS 2 with frame gen and solid 1080p performance. Although, for just $30 more, B580 offers better performance-per-dollar value.
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- Strong Feature Support
- Solid New Software
- Superior Power Efficiency
- Whisper-Quiet Design
- Official Overclocking Support
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- Notable Performance Dip Vs B580
- Missing Some Software Functions
- Pricing Misses The Mark
- Unnecessarily Oversized Cooler
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When
Intel announced its second-generation Arc GPUs way back in the beginning of December, it revealed two cards. One, we've
already thoroughly reviewed. That's the Arc B580, an aggressively-priced, mid-range GPU that gamers have been scrambling to
scoop up, as it presents an amazing value for the dollar.
The other is this card we're looking at today -- the Arc B570. As is long-standing tradition, the Arc B570 is based on the exact same GPU as the B580, just with a few of the funky bits chopped off—metaphorically, if not literally. Intel impressed us with the B580, but can it pull off the double doozy? Let's find out...
ASRock Challenger Intel Arc B570 Specifications And Features
Looking at the specifications, the Arc B570 is pared down in most of the areas that matter, yet they're all small cuts. It loses two of its Xe Cores, reducing compute capability from 14.6 to 12.7 TFLOPS (FP32). It also drops 100 MHz of boost clock, and a handful of texture engines, reducing the texel fill rate. Memory bandwidth takes a hit, too, due to reduction in bus width (to 160-bit), which necessitates a smaller final memory capacity of 10GB.
What do you get in exchange for all that? Well, some 40 watts lopped off of the board's power budget, for one thing. You get $30 clipped off of the price, too. Arc B570 cards are expected to start at $219—although Intel's at the mercy of its board partners here, as there are no first-party cards. ASRock tells us that this particular card is indeed expected to launch at MSRP, however.
Checking Out The ASRock Challenger Intel Arc B570
The Arc B570 card that we have on hand is ASRock's Challenger model, which will be slightly familiar to anyone who read our review of
ASRock's Challenger Arc B580. Well, the cooler on the new card really isn't that similar. The B570's fan shroud is both significantly less bulky and a lot more stylish in our opinion.
In fact, we've already come upon what is really our only real complaint specific to this particular card, and that's the size of the heatsink-and-fan assembly. ASRock made the decision to outfit the Challenger B570 with large 92-mm fans that necessitate a tall heatsink assembly. Simply put, the cooler sticks up over the top of the expansion slot bracket by nearly an inch.
That's not nearly as big of a problem as it
could be, because the power connector is recessed instead of being flush with the top of the heatsink. As such, your power cable isn't going to be smashed up against the side of your case, because the connector is recessed by nearly an inch. This can make it kind of a pain to plug in, but it's better than the alternative for sure.
That white bar next to the ASRock logo on top of the heatsink is an RGB LED light bar, and it is unbelievably bright. So bright, in fact, that we tried to get a picture of the card with the light enabled, and it kept making the rest of the photo too dark. A dimmer LED would work just fine for decoration's sake, ASRock, but some people probably dig the excessive aesthetic.
Around the back of the card we have a very attractive aluminum backplate with a gap for airflow pass-through, as is commonplace on GPU coolers these days. We definitely would have preferred if the entire card was simply the size of the PCB, though; it would have made this a great choice for people with restricted GPU space in small form factor builds.
Not much to see on the bottom of the card, although you can note that the PCIe connector is wired for just x8 width, just like the Arc B580 we reviewed before. It's likely that the BMG-G21 GPU only has the eight PCIe lanes to begin with, so the only thing to do with the extra lanes would be to
wire them up to M.2 sockets or something. This card doesn't do that, though.
Finally, around the back side of the card we see the standard GPU I/O cluster for a modern graphics card: three DisplayPort connections
and an HDMI port. All three DisplayPort jacks support the latest 2.1 standard for 8K60 output or 4K at 120Hz, while the single HDMI port supports HDMI version 2.1a, allowing it to handle 8K at up to 120Hz, or 4K at a dizzying 480Hz.