When Intel's first-generation ARC GPUs hit the market
over two years ago, Luke and I switched to them
for 30 days with results that were, whoa, my FPS is at nine right now.
What the heck? This is not good. That's why this time,
instead of putting myself through pain and misery, I've lured into unsuspecting chump,
I mean, test subjects, to swap out their 90-class GeForce cards
for Intel's new BattleMage B580 GPU.
At the end of that 30 days, they're gonna report on everything that's good
and everything that's not so good, and they will have to decide
if they are sticking with their Intel cards or going back to their old ones.
They'll also have to decide if they're gonna segue. To our sponsor?
Did you get okay? Yeah, it's heavy. Let's go.
Let's go. Let's go.
First things first, you guys need to pick or ARM wrestle
or maybe don't ARM wrestle. Figure out which of you is getting
the Max Sun iCraft card and which of you is getting the Astrox Steel Legend card.
Why do you guys want the Steel Legend card? I don't know, he wanted it, so I wanted it. It's the different one.
It's OC edition. It's probably clocked a little faster.
I'm actually okay, because I have two systems. I can go matching Max Suns.
Okay, we're gonna have to talk about that in a little bit. Why do you care so much about this one?
It's the OC edition, so it's probably clocked a little faster. And I just like the way it looks.
Look how cool it looks. That does look pretty cool. Yeah, and these are probably RGB,
related to light up or something. Flow through design? Yeah.
That is a really, really small board. I know, it's a, it'll be quite the change.
With that out of the way, let's get this downgrade started.
Now, I see you've got two computers, and you are getting two cards.
So what's the deal with the two computers? I'm a glutton for punishment, so I just wanted twice as much pain.
Oh, that's your girlfriend's PC too. Yes, and I actually have ended up using it quite a bit.
We moved it over to the TV, and we've been playing games on it a lot,
so it wouldn't be a fair test if I only did my downstairs computer.
Wow. I'm committed. Brave. It shouldn't be.
One concern I have right out of the gate is, you said that this machine is gonna be used for TV gaming.
I imagine that's a 4K TV. Oh, it sure is.
We're gonna find out how good XCSS2 is. That's the latest generation of Intel's AI upscaling,
since obviously these cards are not gonna be rendering modern AAA games at native 4K.
Of course, it's possible that David and his SO don't play AAA games on the TV, I hope.
That's pretty much all I play.
Okay, I know you guys have played through Baldur's Gate 3, but maybe you're done Baldur's Gate 3 now?
Yeah, we just finished Dragon Age Veil Guard and Mass Effect Trilogy,
and I'm going through Witcher 3. We're having a bit of trouble on the Witcher
because I'm using the Ultra Plus settings. No ray tracing or anything,
but even that, it's struggling to get 60. I don't think you'll be playing on Ultra Plus anymore.
We're gonna find out. One thing Ark handles well, though, is media encoding.
And David, I know you used to stream, but I don't think you have done much lately?
No, I have not, but maybe this is just the boost I need.
I kinda doubt that. So he won't be getting much of a benefit
from one of Ark's biggest strong points. With that in mind, what, if anything,
are you looking forward to? I'm seeing this as shorting the GPU market.
I am planning on selling both of these cards immediately
because everything is inflated with this crazy surge pricing,
and I'm really hoping that in a couple months, things calm down a little bit.
I might be making the wrong choice, but we'll see. Interesting, so this is a permanent change for you
kind of regardless of the outcome. Oh yeah.
Risking it all for the biscuit, man. I love it. And the worst part is that in addition to the 7900XT,
he's ditching a 3090 right now. Seems like a good time to sell.
They're going for about a thousand Canadian. I don't think it's gonna stay there.
I'm really counting on that 9070 and 9070XT to be disruptive in the market
in a way that AMD hasn't done before.
Wait, did I hear you right? You're betting on AMD GPU.
Please have a good price. We're recording this before the 9070 launch.
It's just, it's good. It's good, it's cool, it's nice. We like it, we're happy.
They could be cheaper. They could be, they could be cheaper. Please don't be $900.
Please don't be typical AMD. With that said, the scuttlebutt I heard
is that AMD is gonna have a ton of stock. That's fantastic, and I think that might drive all the price down.
And it may actually be the truth because they've literally been shipping these to retailers
for like two months now. That's fantastic. They delayed it because the software stuff is what I heard.
Well, and MSRP means almost nothing these days on GPUs
because everything is at a slightly inflated or a mega inflated price.
Yeah, even these 580s are at an inflated price. We did find one that was a pretty good deal
with a power supply for about 335 bucks.
So it was in a bundle, but all the standalone cards are more like $400.
Really? Not looking good for David. I mean, one good thing for David
is that instead of trading his faster GPUs for two $250 GPUs,
now they're $400 GPUs.
Profit. Is there any cards with six pin PCIe connectors anymore?
Cause it feels so annoying. I hate these connectors. Ah.
Do away with it. There's gotta be something. I don't know, maybe 3060s.
Yeah. There's at least recent enough ones
that you kind of still gotta have the six plus two. Not my finest work,
but hey, at least it's not a 12 volt high power.
So it probably won't melt. The white looks a lot better than the silver does though.
Yeah, this build looks great. How's your build?
Ah, the weight does not match yours. No, it looks a lot out of place. Mind you, I mean, look,
realistically was this an aesthetic build anyway? No, it's the front that matters.
I can see why you had me build the girlfriend PC.
All right. Time for Ploof's downgrade. We're bringing back into like stream downgrade.
Woo. Yeah. I feel like I've made a huge mistake.
I feel like you've made a huge mistake too. Yeah.
I mean, you've got a 4090. I know. The good news is that 4090s are at peak value right now.
So if you wanted to do the same thing as David and sell it, be pretty smart.
No, I don't want to do that. I said I wouldn't buy a 5090.
So what would I upgrade to? Oh. Wait, you're totally gonna buy a 5090 though.
No, I already told you I don't believe you. I said I wouldn't. I know what you said.
No, I pre-ordered one, but that's going to him.
That's going to him. That's going to him. I kept the pre-order.
It's not, it's from Memrex. So like it'll arrive when it arrives.
And then he gets to go buy it. And he gets to spend $3,000 plus, Canadian.
So you are actually just putting your 49TI on the shelf.
It's gonna hurt. I'm cutting my VRAM in half.
It's gonna hurt, but at least it won't hurt.
It's really not gonna. I also want to take the moment to check
and see if anything's burning or melting. I don't think so, because I'm using the squid.
Looks good. Yeah, it seems fine. It smells good. Yeah, it smells probably fine.
What is this back plate? That's a cool RGB back plate that's covered in dust.
It used to fit my 3090 a lot better than it fits my 4090. It doesn't fit anything.
It's just sitting here. Yeah, it just sits on top. It's going to fit the 580 perfect.
It's blocking your flow through cooler. You took the screws out?
Yeah, someone did. Hold on, I don't got the latch. Yeah, it's hard to get at.
Okay, I think I got it. Oh, you do, okay. Nice. Okay, excellent.
There it goes. Now, David was already concerned
about running the games that he plays at the resolution that he runs at with a B580.
Now, you are a man who owns a monitor. Yes, several.
And a man who plays a lot of cutting edge games.
I do. What's your target resolution and frame rate, typically?
I don't have a lower resolution display right now because I'm gaming on my TV and my monitor
and they're both 4K. Okay, and what kind of FPS do you expect out of your GPU?
Out of my 4090 at like ultra settings, 60 plus,
you know, in most modern games, native without DLSS or anything.
Okay, I bet I can get you 60 plus FPS. And 80P.
Not at ultra settings, maybe 1440. Maybe.
Maybe 1440, not with this plastic all over it though. I can go down in resolution
and, you know, I'm actually really excited about XCSS too.
It's supposed to be pretty good. And I'm not expecting the same level of quality
that I'm getting now. I'm gonna go to low, maybe medium, probably 1440P,
maybe even 1440P upscaling from 1080P.
But, you know, I just, I wanna try it.
I think they're neat. I think that the value that you can get out of this graphics card, at least at, you know,
proper MSRP is actually very impressive. And like I said, I did find that one card
that if you happen to need a power supply is damn near MSRP pricing.
Intel tells me that they are desperately working on getting enough stock out there.
I think that even they were shocked by how good this thing was.
Yeah, I've got friends who love Arc. And with Intel, I actually kind of believe that.
Like with NVIDIA, I look at it and I go, come on, you guys are just making more AI cards, right?
But with Intel, especially after what a dog Alchemist was,
I could legitimately see them being like, oh, let's not make too many of these.
Oh, wait, it's actually good? Oh, shit.
Where's our other shipments? Another thing I'm pretty excited about. Okay, I'm gonna let you finish,
but is that a piece of masking tape holding your SSD in?
Oh yeah, I couldn't find the screw, the M.2 screw.
Hey, it still works, it detects. I've never had a single issue with this SSD
being in the bottom. Sorry, what were you excited about?
Losing the squid. Oh yeah. Because I have these nice custom cables
that totally don't suit the build anymore, but you know, they look pretty.
The RGB backplate for the GPU actually fits like perfectly now.
It breaks your past through cooling again. I don't care, it looks great.
Oh man. Anyway, the point is,
do you have a benefit from the encoding capabilities or?
I mean, my 4090 would probably do a better job anyway, but this is my Plexbox.
Okay. I stream everything from this machine because if I'm not gaming.
That's why it's full of hard drives. It's so heavy.
I know. It's a little better now, that 4090's out of it. Yeah, but it's still a beefy boy.
All right, why don't you show us a couple of the games you're playing right now? And let's have a look at what kind of settings you can run.
I'm only getting 1280 by 720p.
Oh, we got a DDU, I haven't. Yep, new drivers, let's go.
Being on NVIDIA all the time means that you can usually just hock your new card in
and it'll pick it up, but nope, it's time to wipe everything.
Yep. It might not be as easy as the NVIDIA app, but you know what?
Just searching Intel Arc drivers took me right to their page
and the downloads right there. I hope this is gonna be as easy as everyone else makes it.
Alchemist, the drivers were pretty rough at launch, but this should be okay. It's been a while and they've been, you know,
just ramping up all their software development ever since Alchemist came out,
so I'm not super worried about that. You don't seem super worried.
I'm not worried about driver support.
I'm worried just strictly about performance. Yeah, I don't need a monitor.
That's why I set it up here. You look ready to go.
You know, I'm ready to game. I've got, my drivers are all up to date.
Yep. I love my drivers. I love that it tells me that Rebar is enabled.
Right, this is really important for getting the most performance out of Intel Arc.
Both generations. Pretty much if you have an older system that doesn't support Rebar, don't go Arc.
Yeah. All right, what are we gonna try first? Bellatro! Bellatro!
Think it'll handle it? I think it'll handle Bellatro.
If Bellatro can run on phones, it can run on a B580.
One nice thing is this is basically, literally the monitor that I have at home.
And... So this is it? This is it. This is the experience.
This is basically, you know, I might as well be at home right now. Yo, 240 FPS.
Let's go. That's all I need. Let's roll this flush.
Yeah, go Bellatro, go!
Let's confirm this is better than your 4090. Well, better, I don't know.
Okay, well, that's whatever. It runs Bellatro great. I'm not gonna keep going with Bellatro.
Dota, I'm curious though, because we do know I play a lot of Dota.
Mm-hmm. You know, some people said that, oh, what does this guy need a 5094?
All he plays is Dota. That's not true. I might have a lot of hours in Dota,
but that's over like years. Player score. This looks terrible.
I hear the fans going. The menu, we got like 250 frames a second.
Let me make sure all my settings didn't get changed or anything. Oh, it defaulted to basic settings.
I thought it looked awful. So I'll use advanced and I'll turn on all the things
that I would normally, oh, not this thing, that I would normally have on.
Okay, we're not in game. It's already struggling a bit. Like this doesn't usually hitch that bad.
I'm just playing against bots so I can skip ahead. I'm getting 160, 170 frames a second.
Something looks bad though. Game screen render quality was that 40%?
That's why. That's why. Uh-oh.
Okay. Uh-oh, we're in trouble, boys. It looks better.
I'm still getting 140, 150 frames a second.
Now that's weird. Your 1% lows were under 100
when it was rendering at 40%. Yeah. Now they're fine.
Now it's just dead even frame times.
Okay, that I cannot explain. Okay, well, you know,
Dota 4K ultra settings, like, don't get me wrong. It's not 240 Hertz like my monitor supports,
but like 150 in a MOBA?
That's fine. This is totally playable. Let's try seven rebirth.
This is gonna be tough though because remember with the 5090 surprisingly, it didn't improve performance all that much.
So what I'd really like to see is how much it's gonna dip
when I take multiple steps down. Still installing graphics drivers.
Okay, see you later, David. I don't know if it's still set to ultra.
I'm gonna find out in a second, but I'm getting 40 FPS.
It's not set to ultra. And 21 FPS. Hold on, let's just take a look-see.
It looked like it might've been set to 4K. Yeah, it is. Is that the 4K v-sync?
Oh, no, no, it's not. Oh, it's dynamic resolution scaling.
Okay, 100%. So it's not even, but it was set to ultra.
So here, like let's just go straight to medium. This is a very PlayStation 5 level experience.
You're getting 40 FPS. I like that my 1% lows aren't awful.
Yeah, even frame pacing, that's something. It's cool.
Wanna take us outdoors? Okay, so this is just outside the like...
1% lows in the 20 FPS range?
It's playable. I don't think you're playing it at 4K, bro.
No, probably not. Altern on resolution scaling.
Okay, let's have a look. Okay, 66% is a lot better. This is way better.
Oh, dude. Yeah, yeah. This is fine. It's totally fine.
This is fine. Okay. Okay. I'm feeling pretty good about this already.
David, you ready? No. Okay. I don't know where rebar is.
I'll try another game. It got very upset when I closed the game. That's not what my desktop background looks like.
Wait, David, how old is this BIOS? Does this say copyright 2019?
Sure does. Your BIOS is from 2019, bro.
Let's flash a new BIOS on here and then I'm sure we'll be able to find a resizable bar.
It did fix itself after a while, but it also, for whatever reason,
reverted my display to 60 Hertz.
All right, we're on path of exile now. It's got XCSS support.
Yeah. Okay, I went down to balanced. Uh-oh.
And I had to turn some stuff to low or medium.
I don't think you're getting AA, dude. Well, you know what though?
It looks okay. Actually, this does kind of look okay. It's not that bad
and I'm getting like 50 plus 1%. X looks all right.
Yeah, like I'm actually not super disappointed with this. Normally playing controller,
so I can't even remember what my keybinds are for most. Yeah, but it doesn't auto switch yet.
Uh-oh. Okay, I died. But 80 plus, you know, 1% are dipping.
Actually, it looks not bad. And it looks okay. You know what's going to be interesting
about this experiment? To see if you get a little less diva-y,
will you appreciate your 40, 90 more when you go back to it?
I think so. I think I'll appreciate it more. You know, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good.
Yeah. And soon David will get to enjoy it.
Hey, there we go. Yeah, copyright 2024, that's more like it.
Do you guys think that a normal person would go through this for a frigging graphics card?
No, I don't think most people know how to enable rebar.
Update their BIOS. Or update their BIOS. People watching these videos probably do, but you know.
Stay cool, guys. Man, that's a good looking PC.
And with that white GPU, love it. Cloud storage is kind of the best
because I can switch between my Steam Deck and my PC whenever I want.
Yeah, dude, Steam Cloud Save was such a game changer.
Every time I used to format, that was the thing I would be most scared of.
Because photos, I had all my stuff organized, it was all fine. But games, some of them would go to the my games folder,
some of them would be in my documents, some of them would be in program files, and then next to the game executable.
And so you had to go look it up game by game to make sure you didn't lose all your save data.
My big complaint is that you can't manually choose which file to save.
It does it automatically, and it'll ask you if you want to overwrite,
and then you can say no and figure it out. But it'd be nice if I could specifically be like,
that file is the one I want, download it right now.
Okay, here we go. You know what? She's a little soft.
But I played with 1080p FSR at home,
because I sit fairly far away from my computer, so FSR balanced.
I guess it's just- You're not playing with motion blur on, are you? Yeah, I like motion blur.
Oh! Because I want my games to look like movies. In motion, the clarity is definitely reduced.
We're also inches from a 65-inch display.
That's fair. Like go 10 feet away and tell me how it looks.
Okay. I'm gonna sit at what would be a comfortable, okay, you know what, it's fine.
Yeah. Fine. I'll allow it.
It looks a little like jittery and low FPS-y, but I think that's just because you're on a mouse.
It's okay, don't worry. We will not be judging you. Let's judge him.
Not fair, I don't have control. Oh, yeah.
Does that make- It's totally fine. Not even that much worse than it was.
I was at a lock 60, and this is, you know, 52-53.
And so I'll have to tinker with the settings a little bit, because I'm playing on a non-VRR display, but.
Still. I'm actually pretty impressed. This is very usable and looks really good.
Are you actually rendering it 4K? It looks- No, no, no, no, no, this is 1080p.
Okay. This is FSR. Man, they need to flood the market with these things
and get them down to 249, 259, even 269, I'll accept,
you know? It's a pretty nice price, but they've gotta get it close.
Well, the fact that we're both having decent experiences
on like very challenging displays to use,
I'm very impressed already. Not bad. Detail in the foliage is not great,
but our character models are pretty good, and I'm not seeing a ton of ugly aliasing
on really on anything. No, it's fine. It's gonna be an interesting month.
And it's gonna be an interesting message from our sponsor.
If you guys enjoyed this video and you like these sorts of one-month challenges, maybe go check out the first part
of Linus Switches to Mac for a month.
It's not going well so far.