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The Sparkle Arc A580 Orc ships in a dark blue box, with an image of the graphics card taking up most of the front. On the back, Sparkle highlights a few key features of the card and the cooler.
Inside, there's no quick start guide or anything like that – the only accessory is a promo code for two free games (Gotham Knights and Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed) based on the current campaign Intel is running.
As for the card itself… it's very blue. To be honest I am not a fan of the design at all, to me it looks quite dated and a blue graphics card surely limits the overall appeal – what if you already have a colour-coordinated build? Even the PCB is blue which is certainly a bold choice!
That said, while the shroud is made of plastic, it feels reassuringly sturdy in the hand and there is a black metal backplate as we will see below. We can also note the two fans, each measuring in at 90mm diameter.
The Orc is relatively compact too, measuring in at 222 x 101 x 40.9, so it's only just thicker than two PCIe slots. I also weighed it at 734g on my scales.
The front side is home to the Sparkle logo (the only LED lighting zone on the card) and the Intel Arc branding printed in white text.
We can also see the full-length metal backplate with the blue PCB clearly visible underneath. Strangely, there are a few cut-outs in the backplate which would normally allow air to pass through the heatsink and out the back of the card… except the PCB is blocking the cut-outs anyway, so I'm not too sure what this achieves.
Back to that LED zone however, this uses what Sparkle describes as its patent-pending ThermalSync technology. Essentially the Sparkle logo changes colour based on the temperature of the GPU – it shows blue when idling, and changes to yellow when gaming (I saw it change when GPU temperatures exceeded 64C). I didn't see it change to red to indicate an even higher temperature, though of course this will depend on your case's airflow setup and ambient conditions.
Finally, power is delivered by two 8-pin inputs – for reference, the A750 Limited Edition uses one 8-pin and one 6-pin. We can also note three DisplayPort 2.0 video outputs, and one HDMI 2.1 connector.
