The $180 Intel Arc A580 is Team Blue’s new budget GPU

For one thing, both that Nvidia card and that AMD card weren’t great when they were new! Ars Technique called the RTX 3050 “an expensive 1080p GPU” more than 20 months ago. The AMD RX 6600 turns two years old this month. Still, those are cards in the same price range as the new Intel A580, as the RX 7600, RTX 3060, and RTX 4060 cost more.

The good news is that Intel seems willing to hit prices with new cards (and 256-bit memory interfaces for fewer 1440p bottlenecks) that its competitors aren’t always willing to match. And although the drivers are not yet mature, they are. ripein g to the point that some journalists are willing to recommend the A750 as a budget alternative to Nvidia and AMD.

I would suggest waiting until Intel releases its Battlemage GPUs in 2024 rather than acquiring this last vestige of the Alchemist GPU generation. Hopefully AMD and Nvidia will also do better with budget GPUs; It’s been a tough race for entry-level desktop PC gamers recently.

But what if you only have $180 to spend and can’t really budget for an A750? Well, maybe I’ll go for the ASRock A580 instead of the Sparkle A580 since both Tom Hardware and TechPowerUp found The Sparkle has unusually loud fans. TechPowerUp says ASRock doesn’t seem to have that problem.