MSI card with Intel Arc A380 desktop GPU spotted in China, beats Nvidia's GTX 1650 in synthetic tests

Intel still has not managed to successfully launch the Arc Alchemist desktop GPU lineup, despite initial plans for Q1 2022 release. Between a few delays, recent promises for a “very soon“ release and some gloomy rumors suggesting an impending demise of Team Blue’s dGPU branch, the fate of Intel’s return as a key player in the desktop graphics arena remains shrouded in mystery. The more powerful A7xx models might take some more time to see availability, but it looks like the low-end A380 is already offered by MSI in China with workstations produced by DAIV. As reported by ITmedia, the Arc A380 has been tested with a mid-tower configuration that includes a Core I7-12700 processor and 32 GB of DDR4 RAM, and performance is somewhat better compared to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650, especially in synthetic benchmarks.

The GPU-Z spec analysis reveals that the MSI Arc A380 is built with 6 nm tech, and features 8 Xe cores with 128 unified shaders as well as 6 GB of 96-bit GDDR6 VRAM. GPU clock is set to 2450 MHz, while the memory is clocked at 1937 MHz with an effective speed of 15.5 Gbps. The card itself comes with 1x DP and 1x HDMI video outputs, but the cooling shroud with two small fans is quite hefty, making this a two-slot solution.

As far as performance goes, the Arc A380 (DAIV Z3-A380) beats a GTX 1650 (DAIV 4N) by 10% in FireStrike and by 36% in Time Spy. However, the Intel GPU does not appear to be designed for gaming, as it is slightly slower than the GTX 1650 in Final Fantasy XIV. Conversely, the Arc A380 shines in content creation with overall good video decoding and encoding capabilities. This could hint that the A750 and A770 models may at least get strong video decoding / encoding capabilities, in case the gaming performance is not really giving Nvidia's and AMD's mid-range solutions a run for the money.

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