It's been years since this happened: ASUS and Intel team up on a graphics card

Is this a sign that Intel is once again becoming a compelling contender in the GPU market?

For many years now, Intel hasn’t been a serious customer for manufacturers of graphics cards aimed at gamers. The American company’s GPUs had bowed out in the late 2000s, and we had little hope of seeing it return to the forefront—even though it still supplied GPUs for the professional market and integrated graphics solutions in its processors—particularly those used in laptops. That wasn’t enough for ASUS, which had definitively drawn a line under any “graphics collaboration” with Intel… Or so we thought.

In fact, five years after its last graphics card built around an Intel component, ASUS has just surprised everyone by releasing a card called the ASUS UGen Intel Arc Pro B70 32 GB, as reported by the team at VideoCardz. As you can tell from its name, this new card is not intended for gamers any more than it is designed for the general public. It’s a professional model, allowing ASUS to reconnect with Intel five years after the release of the DG1-4G. The five-year-old model had 4 GB, while the new one boasts 32 GB.

An “exploded view” of the ASUS UGen Intel Arc Pro B70 32 GB. © ASUS

Given today’s memory prices, it was clear that the UGen Intel Arc Pro B70 would be aimed at the professional market. It’s powered by a BMG-G31 chip featuring 32 Xe2 cores, which includes 256 XMX units. The 32 GB of VRAM is GDDR6 ECC running on a 256-bit interface bus. All these features make it an exact replica of the reference model presented by Intel. But ASUS has one advantage that sets it apart: the GPU is unlocked so that its power consumption can reach up to 310 W, whereas Intel limits it to 230 W. Such a power reserve should allow it to achieve much better performance—provided, of course, that the cooling system and the chassis housing the card are properly sized. At the same time, these aren’t questions you’ll need to ask yourself: just consider that this card—whose gaming performance is all relative—is expected to sell for over $1,700 in the U.S. We can hardly imagine what it will cost in France.