Although Intel’s Arc B580 is already here, the B570 is only set to launch on January 16. However, a German retailer listed the card well ahead of time and, surprisingly, one B570 actually shipped to a customer. The B580 is one of the best graphics cards for budget-conscious gamers, but how will the B570 compare?
Early listings and preorders happen shockingly often. For example, yesterday we found an RTX 5090 PC priced at well over $6,000. However, those listings often don’t amount to much, and the items don’t ship until their designated release dates — but not this time.
As spotted by VideoCardz, German retailer Mindfactory opened up preorders for the ASRock Challenger Arc B570 graphics card. The card went out of stock quickly, but it appears that the retailer did have the initial batch in stock, as one buyer just received theirs. More surprisingly, they actually got it to work.
VideoCardz dug up a PC Games Hardware forum post by lucky user Cross-Flow, who now owns ASRock’s B570 just under a month in advance. Considering that the official launch date is still so far away, Intel has yet to release official drivers for the B570. That didn’t stop Cross-Flow from still trying to get the GPU to work on less-than-ideal drivers.
Cross-Flow downloaded the B580 driver instead, and then forced it to work using the Device Manager, ignoring a bunch of checksum errors in the process. The user claims that they tried every file in the driver directory until something finally worked. Unsurprisingly, the system only recognizes the GPU as the B580, but it is the B570, as evidenced by the specs.
The read on the specs is a little wonky. The Intel Arc B570 (which shows up as B580) recognizes 10GB VRAM, which is correct for the B570, but only 15 out of 18 Xe cores actually show up. Regardless of this, the user was able to run some games on this graphics card, including World of Warcraft Classic and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The card also handled a multi-monitor setup just fine, and AMD FreeSync support worked, too.
Although we don’t have any proper benchmarks of the card, it probably won’t be long until some of them leak out, given that more people expect their GPUs to arrive within the next few days. There hasn’t been any official information about Intel lifting the review embargo early, though, so unless that changes, we won’t see any reviews of the card until January 16.
