MSI’s SFF Intel Arc A380 LP Graphics Card Pictured, Entry-Level Design Without Power Connectors
The Intel Arc A380 graphics card from MSI sticks with the reference specifications in a custom low-profile form factor. The card features a custom PCB designed specifically for SFF (Small Form Factor) PCs. So far, we have seen Arc AIB designs from GUNNIR and ASRock. The GPU is based on the Alchemist ACM-G11 SKU, featuring 8 Xe-Cores or 1024 ALUs clocked at 2000 MHz. The card comes rated with a 75W TDP, and a 350W PSU requirement, and features a single HDMI 2.0b and three DisplayPort 2.0 (w/ DSC) ports. There’s 6 GB of GDDR6 memory which is the highest we have seen on this gen’s entry-level cards with a data transfer rate of 15.5 Gbps, offering up to 185 GB/s of bandwidth, and since the whole thing is designed around the ITX form factor, it measures 172 x 75 x 38 mm. Talking about the card itself, it looks to support a tiny cooler with a black color shroud that houses two small fans, each with 11-blades. These push air towards the internal heatsink which is made up of several aluminum heatsinks. The MSI Intel Arc A380 graphics card is only available with a full PC so you’ll end up paying around 3899 RMB or around $550 US for an entry-level configuration that gets you the card with a Core i3-10105F CPU, H510M Bomber DDR4 motherboard, 16 GB of DDR4-3200 memory, a 512 GB M.2 NVMe SSD, a MAG A550BN PSU and all of this put inside the MSI MAG Laevatein 100L case. This specific PC was a Chinese OEM design from DAIV (Z3-A380), featuring a Core i7-12700 CPU & room for expandability. The outlet also provides a few benchmarks against a notebook featuring an Intel Core i7-1260P & an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. The card more or less outperforms the NVIDIA card & also offers better AV1 encoding/decoding capabilities. In 3DMark Port Royal, the card offers nearly 3x the performance increase versus an AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT. It is reported that the same PC is available with an NVIDIA GTX 1650 for the same price so it all comes down to whether users want to try out something new or go with a solution that’s been tried and tested in the field. News Sources: ITmedia PCUser_, Momomo_US
