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Here at Ars, we’ve been talking about Intel’s possible execution in the desktop graphics market for a while now. This week, Intel announced the sale of Intel DG1 graphics cards to OEMs and system integrators, to be included in prebuilt systems. So far, two variants of the DG1 have been at least partially announced: an Asus-branded card, passively cooled, and an actively cooled version from an unannounced vendor.
If you’re hoping to score a gray market DG1 and include it in your own home-built system, you’re out of luck. Intel told LegitReviews that DG1 cards will only work on very specific systems, with a custom UEFI (BIOS) supporting the card:
Discrete Iris Xe Expansion Board will be paired with 9th Gen (Coffee Lake-S) and 10th Gen (Comet Lake-S) Intel® Core ™ desktop processors and Intel (R) B460, H410, B365 and H310C chipsets – motherboards based and sold as part of pre-built systems. These motherboards require a special BIOS that supports Intel Iris Xe, so the boards will not be compatible with other systems.
While this is disappointing news for critics like yours, there’s probably nothing to get excited about if you’re an enthusiast looking for the next hot gaming GPU. If we assume that the DG1 Fire Strike benchmarks released in May 2020 are still accurate, it won’t be close to breaking records just yet.
Think about value, not vroom
With a 5538 Fire Strike, the Intel DG1 development board in this May leak is faster than on-board graphics – but slower than entry-level discrete GPUs from AMD (RX 560) and Nvidia ( GTX 1050), and it’s not even close to being on par with high-end gaming GPUs. Of course, those leaked benchmarks were for a development version of the DG1, and it’s possible that the newly released OEM version is faster, but we don’t expect that to be the case.
OEM version could even be Slow down hardware than the development version was – newer OEM versions offer 80 threads (UEs), while at least some versions of development boards sported 96. Driver quality improvements over the years The past eight months are more likely to have a positive impact on performance, but we doubt this will change the card’s ultimate place in the market – the DG2 may be a whole different story, but the DG1 seems destined to drive Relatively inexpensive desktops without a heavy focus on gaming.
On the flip side, if Intel (and its partners) can actually produce the DG1 in a large volume and on time, it could end up being a smash hit with OEMs despite poor performance – Nvidia’s GTX 1050 and the RX. AMD’s 560 are faster if you have them, but they’re hard to find. The GTX 1050 should be a $ 110 card, but we couldn’t find a new GTX 1050 today on Amazon for under $ 300 or on Newegg for less than $ 180.
Both released versions of the DG1 card feature 4GB LPDDR4X, support PCIe 4 (although no Intel processor yet supports it), and offer dual-link HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI-D outputs with plug-in jack. load up to three simultaneous 4K displays.
We expect to see DG1 boards appear in the OEM value-driven desktop lineup later in 2021.
List image by Intel
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