Intel Arc A580 Review ft. Sparkle Orc

Before we dive into the benchmarks, we should clarify how we've tested the Sparkle Arc A580 Orc today. Usually, we test all of our comparison GPUs at reference specifications for these reviews – that's easier when we get the Nvidia Founders Edition, or Intel Limited Edition boards for review. The Sparkle Orc is an AIB card and not only has it been factory overclocked from 1.7GHz up to 2GHz, but it quickly became clear from our testing that Sparkle has significantly increased the power draw – Intel claims the A580 should hit 185W, but we saw 215W power draw from the Orc.

While Intel's tuning tool doesn't allow you to lower clock speed, we did reduce the power limit of the Orc, setting a 132W chip-only limit, which resulted in as close to 185W total board power as we could get.

Doing so did reduce performance, but not by a whole lot – by 2% in Cyberpunk 2077 and 4% in A Plague Tale: Requiem. This is just something to bear in mind across this review – we tested the Sparkle in its default, out of the box configuration, so it will run a small bit faster than a reference clocked card.

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