News Intel Arc A310 Graphics Card Quietly Goes Official

Wait, this lil' thing is X16 while the 380 is X8? That doesn't make sense; is that correct? EDIT: I just saw the official slides and they list it as "up to", so both the 380 and 310 could be X16. I didn't know that.

Other than that, I wonder what the purpose of this card really is? There already exists a 380 without a 6pin, so this would need to be for a very specific market or OEM reject perhaps?

Regards.
 

King_V

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Other than that, I wonder what the purpose of this card really is? There already exists a 380 without a 6pin, so this would need to be for a very specific market or OEM reject perhaps?

I suspect that, while they officially list the power at 75W, it's probably significantly lower, so, I would assume that it could more easily be made into a low-profile card while also having a single-slot-height cooler.
 
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ThisIsMe

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No matter how fast/good the new nVidia 40xx video encoder is/will be, these non-pro cards are still limited to 2 simultaneous encodes/transcodes. AMD’s video capabilities for RDNA 3 are still unknown, but all of their current and previous cards are now in third place.

I can see many people buying these lower cost Intel GPU’s just to upgrade their video processing capabilities. A workstation with 4 ARC cards installed would be a video rendering powerhouse. All for the price of a single nVidia consumer card. Or simply slap one of these into an unused slot along side your existing 3070/80/90 and call it a day.
 

Eximo

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I'm tempted to buy a new case after putting the ASRock A380 in my HTPC, the 8-pin power connector comes out right where the SATA power leads come out the back of my SATA SSD. Quite an effort to get that to fit. But the MSI A380 without a power connector isn't intended for direct sale, not sure I would go for a A310 unless it was like $75, if it is closer to $100, then the A380 makes more sense (as long as you have a PCIe 8-pin. I didn't, but I got a new SFX power supply, the old one had a six-pin, but was also pushing 10 years old.

Took me a bit to get the audio working via HDMI, but after that, no complaints for general use and video playback. Tried one old DX9 title. Worked okay, but it did stutter when loading in new assets for some reason. Maybe a DX12 conversion hiccup?

Might take it apart and re-paste it or something. It is right on the threshold of being passively cooled for video playback, spins the fan about once every three minutes or so. Need to measure it and see if there are any heatsinks that might fit it better.
 

cschepers

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Other than that, I wonder what the purpose of this card really is? There already exists a 380 without a 6pin, so this would need to be for a very specific market or OEM reject perhaps?

My guess is it's for corporate PC's that need a dedicated GPU (i.e. replacement for the GT730), or for folks that want the cheapest/smallest/low-power-est GPU encoding for Plex. Or what I want, something for my old WFH PC that can do hardware encoding for WebEx/Teams/Zoom/whatever.
 

RedBear87

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Also we see that it purportedly offers PCIe 4.0 x16 support, but the A380 is limited to x8, which would be peculiar.
I think it's similar to the description on their website for the A380

they probably mean that it supports x16 mechanical connections.