Intel teases an Arc graphics card, and it has 3x 8-pin power connectors

pcgamer.com:

As the launch of Intel’s Arc Alchemist series of draws closer, it seems like every day brings a new titbit of information. Today brings another nugget. During a recent interview, Intel graphics fellow Tom Petersen very briefly teased a desktop graphics card. For all of a second, a card was shown with three eight-pin PCIe power connectors.

The tease came via a YouTube interview with HotHardware(opens in new tab), which you can see above. We don’t know whether this is a pre-production sample of just an engineering board, but it would be a bit unusual to show the latter in a press interview. If a real Arc card comes with 450W of PCIe connector power plus another 75W via the slot, then we could be looking at a hot and power-hungry card, even if it doesn’t use all of the available 525W.

A TDP near that level would mean it’s going to be comparable to an RTX 3090 Ti(opens in new tab) in power consumption. Unless Intel has pulled off a market shattering miracle, it’s unlikely that a card from the Alchemist generation will be able to reach that kind of performance level. We hope that this was just a tease and the real Arc cards won’t need that kind of power.

If — and it’s a very big if — Intel is able to offer 3080 or 6800 XT class performance at around 450W then even though its performance per watt would be behind that of Nvidia and AMD, it could still appeal to gamers. But only if they are available at compelling prices. Of course, we’re only talking about high end cards here. The entry level and mid-range products are where the real volume is and these markets will be very interesting battlegrounds.

Best CPU for gaming(opens in new tab): The top chips from Intel and AMDBest gaming motherboard(opens in new tab): The right