Intel’s faster Arc GPUs could be priced to take on Nvidia

Intel has dropped a hint regarding how much some of its higher-end Arc graphics cards will cost.

As VideoCardz spotted, this comes back to Intel’s scavenger hunt competition which kicked off early in 2021, offering a bundle of prizes for winners including an Arc GPU – the problem being that those graphics cards haven’t yet been released, of course.

Meaning that the promised Arc A770 and A750 GPUs didn’t get sent to winners yet (obviously), so Intel offered an alternative prize for those who did not want to wait any longer.

Those alternatives have just been revealed, and they are the Core i7-12700K or Core i5-12600K processors. So now folks who earlier opted to receive a different prize can get one of those CPUs, or if that’s not to their liking, elect to take the original prize and hang on for an A7 series graphics card. Note that this decision needs to be made by August 19 (this coming Friday).

What’s interesting about this is that Intel’s blurb mentions that the overall prize value will be of “equivalent” worth to the original Arc GPU plus package of goodies (as you might expect). Therefore we can glean that the A770 roughly matches the value of a 12700K processor, and the same should be true of the A750 regarding the 12600K. Currently, the MSRPs of those processors are $409 and $289 respectively in the US.

Analysis: Putting together the pieces of the pricing puzzle

This is a suggestion – and it is just that, a hint which we must take with a great deal of caution – that the A770 might be pitched at $400 in the US (around £330, AU$570), and the A750 at $300 (around £250, AU$430), or perhaps just under these potential MSRPs.

That makes sense given that we’ve just seen Intel release benchmarks for the Arc A750 which show the graphics card performing ably against Nvidia’s RTX 3060. That Nvidia graphics card has an MSRP of $329, so dipping just under that would fit the apparent bill for Intel, if it wanted to produce a mid-range GPU that undercuts Team Green – and that’s presumably what Team Blue will be aiming for. The rumor mill has previously floated figures of around the $300 mark for the price of the A750, so again, that’s another piece which slots into the overall puzzle here.

As for the top-end A770 GPU, pitching it at about $400 would put the card at around the same price level as the RTX 3060 Ti, and based on what we’ve heard thus far about rumored performance, that would again make sense. It all depends on how aggressively Intel wants to price its beefier Arc Alchemist graphics cards, and given the rocky launch and many delays around these desktop GPUs so far, maybe the firm will want to give buyers more reasons to purchase than we’ve seen thus far (with concerns around graphics driver quality doubtless being off-putting to some folks).

Is the fact that the alternative prizes are being sent out soon a sign that maybe these Arc GPUs aren’t too far off release, either? That’s one way you could read this, perhaps, but with the way the Arc desktop launch has gone so far, we wouldn’t hold our breath.

With all the delays, the worry is that these Arc graphics cards are going to be facing off against AMD and Nvidia’s next-gen line-ups, although that said, the RTX 4060 is far from expected to be one of the first Lovelace GPUs out of the gate.