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This version of the DG1’s Asus brand is passively cooled – which should give you a hint of where the DG1 fits in terms of the GPU’s raw performance.
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This actively cooled version of DG1 was built by “another partner”, which Intel mistakenly identified as Colorful. No word yet on who is actually doing this.
Here at Ars, we’ve been talking about Intel’s eventual run on the desktop graphics market for a while. This week, Intel announced sales of Intel DG1 graphics cards to OEMs and system integrators for inclusion in pre-built systems. So far, two variants of the DG1 have been at least partially announced – a passively cooled Asus brand plate and an actively cooled version from an unannounced supplier.
If you hope to get a gray market DG1 and include it in your own system, you’re out of luck. Intel told LegitReviews that DG1 cards will only work on very specific systems, with customized UEFI (BIOS) that supports the card:
The Iris Xe discrete expansion card will be paired with 9th generation (Coffee Lake-S) and 10th generation (Comet Lake-S) and Intel (R) B460, H410, B365 and H310C- motherboards based and sold as part of pre-built systems. These motherboards require a special BIOS that supports Intel Iris Xe, so the cards will not be compatible with other systems.
While this is disappointing news for reviewers like yours, it’s probably nothing to be upset about if you’re an enthusiast looking for the next hot gaming GPU. If we assume that the leaked DG1 Fire Strike benchmarks for May 2020 are still accurate, it won’t come close to breaking any records yet.
Think of value, not vroom
With a 5,538 Fire Strike, the Intel DG1 dev card from that May leak is faster than the integrated graphics, but slower than the entry-level discrete GPUs from AMD (RX 560) and Nvidia (GTX 1050), and it’s not even close to being on par with GPUs for next-generation games. Of course, these leaked benchmarks were in a development version of DG1, and it’s possible that the newly released OEM version will be faster – but we don’t expect that to be the case.
The OEM version can even be Slower hardware than the dev version – the new OEM versions offer 80 execution units (EUs), while at least some versions of the dev cards boasted 96. Improvements in driver quality over the past eight months are more likely to have a positive impact on performance, but we doubt it will change the board’s definitive place on the market – the DG2 may be a completely different story, but the DG1 seems destined to drive relatively cheap desktops without a heavy focus on games.
On the other hand, if Intel (and its partners) can actually produce DG1 in significant volume and on time, it could end up being a resounding success with OEMs, despite mediocre performance – Nvidia’s GTX 1050 and AMD’s RX 560 are faster if you really have it, but are hard to find. The GTX 1050 should be a $ 110 card – but we couldn’t find a new GTX 1050 today on Amazon for less than $ 300 or on Newegg for less than $ 180.
Both released versions of the DG1 card feature 4GB LPDDR4X, support PCIe 4 (although no Intel CPU supports it yet) and offer HDMI, DisplayPort and dual-link DVI-D outputs with support for up to three simultaneous 4K monitors.
We expect to see DG1 cards appear on the OEM value-oriented desktop line in late 2021.
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