ASRock Intel Arc A580 Challenger 8GB OC

Intel has been fighting an uphill battle all through 2023, as the silicon giant's attempts to break into the graphics card market have been hampered by driver issues and stiff competition. Intel isn't giving up, however, and its latest GPU may well be its best to date. With a budget-friendly MSRP of $179.99 and street price about $10 below that, ASRock's take on the Intel Arc A580, the A580 Challenger 8GB OC, stands out as one of the least expensive cards we've tested in the last few years, with performance well above what you'd expect for its price. For that, it earns our Editors' Choice award for budget GPUs, in a market starved for choice at the low end and wracked by high GPU prices.

Design: Intel's GPU Sweet Spot?

From its specs alone, Intel's Arc A580 GPU looks like it would be more of a yawner than awe-inspiring: With three-quarters of the hardware resources of the company's Arc A770, the A580 on paper is little more than a moderately slower variant. But a price just half of the A770's makes it stand out.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

To make things even better, a closer look reveals that hardware wasn't scaled back by 25% across the board. The GPU's shaders, raster operation processors (ROPs), and texture mapping units (TMUs) are indeed 75% of the Arc A770's, but the memory interface was kept at 256 bits wide. Even with slightly slower memory modules, the Arc A580 offers almost the same total bandwidth at 512GBps versus 560GBps for the A770. You can't buy an Arc A580 card with 16GB of GDDR6, but 8GB is realistically plenty for its market position.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

Officially, clock speed was also dialed back to maintain a performance gap between the Arc A770 (2,100MHz) and the A580 (1,700MHz). But factory overclocking can make up for a lot of this loss—the ASRock Arc A580 Challenger 8GB OC justifies its overclock initials with a setting of 2,000MHz, making it only slightly slower than the more costly GPU.

All of these attributes combine to deliver a graphics card that in most cases is only a bit slower than the Arc A770, and nowhere near the 25% slower that Intel's official specs might suggest.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

Nor do the build quality and thermal design of the ASRock card suffer from its affordable price point. The Challenger's thermal solution doesn't feel quite as premium as the one Intel employed on its Arc A770 Limited Edition card, but it doesn't feel cheap, either. The inclusion of a metal backplate, often absent on budget cards, helps the ASRock come across as a well-made quality product rather than an economy model. The cooler also has four copper heatpipes running through its heatsink that are actively cooled by two large fans. The setup proves perfectly adequate for cooling the GPU.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

ASRock opted for a near-universal-standard configuration on the card's rear I/O panel, with three DisplayPort 2.0 ports and a single HDMI 2.0b port. You'll also find two 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

Test Setup

The testbed I use for benchmarking graphics cards incorporates a stock-clocked Intel Core i9-12900K processor on an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard, cooled by a Corsair Hydro Series H100X 240mm water cooler. The system has 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM clocked at 5,600MHz and a 1TB Corsair MP600 Pro NVMe 4.0 solid-state drive as its primary storage device. The power supply is a 1,500-watt Corsair HX1500i 80 Plus Platinum unit, and the operating system is Windows 11 Pro with all the latest updates installed.

The Arc A580 faces an abundance of competition in its price range and market segment, but it benefits from being the most modern of these solutions. Cards like the AMD Radeon RX 6600 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050, which can be picked up nowadays for about $200, stand out as the most notable rivals in terms of price. Faster GPUs like the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and 4060 are likely to outpace the Arc A580, but they cost a fair bit more.

Synthetic Testing

The synthetic benchmarks I ran all show the Arc A580 handily outpacing its value-priced peers such as the Radeon RX 6600 and GeForce RTX 3050. These tests aren't really indicative of real-world results, but they do suggest that the A580 shouldn't have a problem against these two GPUs.

Most of the tests also show the Arc A580 zeroing in on the RX 7600 and RTX 4060, too, but Furmark gives us a different picture, with the Arc A580 lagging behind these modern competitors.

FSR, DLSS, and XeSS Testing

Ray-tracing performance has long been an Nvidia strong point, but we have some reason to suspect that it's an asset for Intel, too. Minor spoiler: the Radeon RX 7600 showed a considerable advantage over the Arc A580 in most of our game tests, but this lead dissolved when ray-tracing is used.

That's not to say that the RX 7600 is the slower of the two cards in this test—it still held a 9% advantage over the Arc A580 at 1080p—but the Intel GPU managed to pass the RX 7600 in the same game at 4K resolution. This is a rare win for the A580, which managed to stay right on the RX 7600's heels when FSR was enabled and stayed at that point throughout the Returnal tests. Neither card was quite able to match the GeForce RTX 4060 in these two games, however, due to the Nvidia GPU's excellent ray-tracing performance.

The Arc A580 scored another technical victory in Cyberpunk 2077, where its 2K and 4K performance was far ahead of the RX 7600's even though the AMD GPU was significantly quicker at 1080p. The Arc A580 even edged the RTX 4060 in the 4K test, but as the game was far from playable at that resolution it was a rather hollow victory.

In Guardians of the Galaxy, we saw the Arc A580 outright beat the Radeon RX 7600 at all resolutions. This game has shown a tendency to favor Nvidia cards, and the GeForce RTX 4060 retains a clear lead, but it seems that Intel has stirred better support for the game into its drivers. Our Arc A750 test results used an earlier driver and clearly show that Intel performance has improved dramatically.

AAA Game Tests

Games with ray-tracing support prove to be a high point for the Arc A580 and Intel's line of graphics cards in general. As we move on to games without ray-tracing support, things look less rosy for the A580.

I have no question here that the RX 7600 is far faster than the A580, with a performance advantage ranging from 8.7% to 43.5% depending on resolution. The Arc A580 tended to scale better as resolution was increased, as it has more bandwidth, but the Radeon RX 7600 simply has more raw computational horsepower. In Total War, the A580 was closely matched by AMD's Radeon RX 6600, which had slightly better 1080p performance but slower 2K and 4K performance. The Arc A580 also came close to the Nvidia RTX 3060 here.

Things remained about the same in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with the GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600 again outpacing the Arc A580, which traded blows with the RX 6600. The A580 was only about 5% slower than the RX 7600 at 4K resolution, but it wasn't even close at 1080p. Far Cry 5 proved even more challenging for the Intel GPU, as it managed only to tie the RX 6600 at 4K while being significantly slower at lower resolutions.

Legacy Game Tests

Intel made it clear that supporting current and upcoming DirectX 12 games was its priority when creating its graphics-card drivers. Support for older games using APIs like DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 was hit-and-miss early on, and remains lackluster even though the company has put significant effort into improving the situation.

Still, we're happy to see performance has improved a bit, and games in general seem to be more stable. The first Intel card we tested wasn't able to run our Bioshock Infinite benchmark, for instance, but the Arc A580 does just fine. It's certainly slower than we'd like to see, but the game was playable with a smooth 61fps experience. Hitman Absolution could still use a fair bit of work, but as every card I test with this title returns results that are far lower than they should be for a decade-old game, the A580's performance here is not surprising.

I encountered one other game that I regularly benchmark that I couldn't get to work with the Arc A580, and that's Sleeping Dogs. But that's more of a side issue than a real problem in my opinion; while the benchmark crashed every time I tried it, the game itself starts and seems to run fine, so it appears to be a glitch with the benchmarking part of the software rather than the actual game.

Arc A580 Power Consumption and Thermals

I use a Kill-A-Watt wall meter to measure the power draw of the graphics card test bed as a whole. Since only the graphics card is changed between tests, this gives a relatively accurate idea of how one card's power consumption compares with another's.

The Arc A580's power draw is on the high end of its market segment, with the ASRock card pulling more power than several rivals like the RX 7600. Its idle power consumption was particularly disappointing—an issue that's persisted since the first Intel graphics cards were released and has yet to be fixed. The cards don't idle down quite right, which causes them to use a relatively large amount of power while just sitting on the desktop.

Collecting thermal readings in Returnal showed that the A580 also got a bit hot under the shroud during testing with a peak temp of 76 degrees C. This isn't really bad or concerning; a better thermal solution certainly could keep the card cooler under load, but again, we're talking about a budget GPU here. Pricier thermal hardware really isn't necessary, or worth hiking the price.

Verdict: The First Real Arc Contender

The ASRock Intel Arc A580 Challenger 8GB OC isn't the fastest graphics card we've tested by a long shot, but we're impressed nevertheless. The performance results varied a lot from one game to the next, and while the Arc A580 was able to challenge the likes of the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and RTX 4060 in a few areas, it was never able to quite decisively beat them.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

But before you write off the Arc A580 as the clear loser, consider the price disparity between these cards. The RX 7600 has an MSRP of $269 and the RTX 3060 and 4060 are slightly higher at $289 and $299 respectively. At $179.99, the Challenger 8GB OC is almost $100 less than the cheapest of the trio but offers significantly more than half the performance.

To be sure, that isn't a big enough win that we'd recommend the Arc A580 if you can afford a Radeon RX 7600 or a GeForce RTX 4060; far from it. But if you're trying to find the best new graphics card you can for under $200, the ASRock may well be the winner here at the end of 2023—and it earns our Editors' Choice award both on the value proposition it presents and due to the lack of competition in the under-$200 tier. Message to AMD and Nvidia: It's well past time to pony up some new low-end cards!