After being announced back on December 3rd, the first graphics card from the new Intel Arc Battlemage series – Intel Arc B580 – was released on the 13th. It proved to be a hit with reviewers, especially if you’re looking for “a budget card that doesn’t suck for once.” Considering the great value on offer with the B580, it isn’t surprising to see that the card has already sold out for the most part.
The 12GB VRAM GPU offers an excellent alternative to the likes of the existing RTX 4060 and RX 7600, retailing from just $249 and beating out its close competition in price to performance. It seems like Intel understands that 8GB is no longer going to impress anyone and the B580’s performance has resonated with budget gaming PC builders.
- GPU: BMG-G21
- VRAM: 12GB GDDR6
- Memory bus width: 192-bit
- Boost clock speed: 2,670 MHz
- Shading units: 2,560
- Bandwidth: 456.0 GB/s
- Base clock speed: 2,670 MHz
Intel Arc B580 is out of stock, unless you want to pay a premium
We discovered that Newegg was one of the best places to buy the Arc B580, including the ‘Limited Edition’ reference card from Team Blue.
From the list above, just the GUNNIR cards remain in stock at the moment. Incidentally, these are also the only ones we’ve been able to find on Amazon. But since they come with a premium price tag, we’d recommend avoiding them considering the B580 excels in price to performance (and what’s the point if it doesn’t provide that)?
In any case, the majority of these graphics cards are estimated to be restocked in the new year. According to Newegg, the ETAs look like this at the time of writing:
- Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition: January 3rd, 2025
- Acer Nitro Intel Arc B580: December 20th, 2024
- SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC: Unspecified
- ASRock STEEL LEGEND Intel Arc B580: January 3rd, 2025
- ASRock Challenger Arc B580: January 3rd, 2025
Intel Arc B580 could prove to be popular in the mid-range
Considering how quickly the GPU has sold out online, perhaps Intel wasn’t immediately sure how well it would perform on launch day. It also indicates that we’re looking at more of a paper launch here, though the promise of replenished stock is a good sign. Just last week, we could see that Intel’s discrete GPUs were practically nonexistent in terms of market share, with Nvidia seeing 90% of sales compared to AMD’s 10%. But with excellent options like the B580 now available, the mid-range should be much more competitive.
With that in mind, now could be Intel’s chance to capture a larger audience on the GPU front. The recent launch of its Core Ultra 200S series CPUs didn’t exactly go to plan, so a redemption with its graphics cards is much-needed – especially with the recent retirement of its CEO, Pat Gelsinger. We called the flagship 285K CPU “a necessary fresh start” but it doesn’t feel like enough.
