When Intel's first generation ARC GPUs hit the market over 2 years ago, Luke
and I switched to them for 30 days with results that
were wo my FPS is at uh 9 right now.
What the heck, dude? This is not good. That's why this time, instead of putting
myself through pain and misery, I've lured in two unsuspecting chump, I mean
a test subjects, to swap out their 90
class GeForce cards for Intel's new Battle Mage B580 GPU.
At the end of that 30 days, they're going to 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. Um, they'll also
have to decide if they're going to segue to our
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below. 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 Suncraft card and which
of you is getting the ASRock Steel Legend card. Why do you guys want the
Steel Legend? 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 cuz I have two systems. I can go
matching Maxons. Okay, we're going to have to talk about that in a little bit.
Why do you care so much about this one? Um, it's the OC edition, so it's
probably clocked a little faster. And I just like the way it looks. Look how
cool that looks. That does look pretty cool. Yeah, and these are probably RGB
or they light up or something. Flow through design. Yeah, that is a really
really small board. I know it's a 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
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. Shouldn't be. One concern I have right out of the gate is you said that
this machine is going to be used for TV gaming. Mhm. I imagine that's a 4K TV.
Oh, it sure is. We're going to find out how good XSS2 is. That's the latest
generation of Intel's AI upscaling since obviously these cards are not going to
be rendering modern AAA games at native 4K. Of course, it's possible that David
and his don't play AAA games on the TV.
I hope that's uh pretty much all I play.
Uh okay. I know you guys have played through Boulders Skate 3, but maybe
you're done Balders Skate 3 now. Yeah, we just finished Dragon Age Veilgard and
uh Mass Effect Trilogy. Uh, and I'm going through Witcher 3. We're having a
bit bit of trouble on the Witcher because I'm using the Ultra Plus settings. No ray tracing or anything,
but even that uh, it's struggling to get 60. I don't think you'll be playing on
ultra plus anymore. We're going to find out. One thing Arc 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 kind of doubt that. So, he won't be getting much of a benefit from one of
Arc'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 7900 XT, he's
ditching a 3090 right now. Seems like a good time to sell. They're going for
about a,000 Canadian. I don't think it's going to stay there. I'm really counting
on that 9070 and 970 XT 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 to 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. I 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 going to 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 of software stuff is what I
heard. Well, and MSRP means almost nothing these days on GPUs because
everything is at a, you know, slightly inflated or 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, it's 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? Cuz it feels so annoying. I hate these connectors. Uh,
just do away with it. There's got to be something. I don't know. Maybe 3060s.
Yeah, there there's at least recent enough ones that you kind of still got
to have the 6 plus two. Not my finest work, but uh hey, at least it's not a
12vt 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? Uh, the
white 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 Plof's downgrade. We're bringing back Intel Extreme
downgrade. Yeah. I feel like I've made a huge
mistake. I feel like you've made a huge mistake, too. Yeah.
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 I said I wouldn't buy a 5090. So, what
would I upgrade to? Oh, wait. You're totally going to buy a
1590, though. I already told you I don't believe I said I wouldn't. I know what you said. I bought one. I No, I
pre-ordered one and But that's going to buy one. That's going to him. That's
going to him. I kept the pre-order. It's not It's from Memorex. So, like it'll
arrive when it arrives and then he gets to go buy it. Okay. And he gets to spend
$3,000 plus dollars Canadian. So, you are actually just putting your
49 just on the shelf. I It's going to
hurt. It's I'm going I'm cutting my VRM in half. It's going to hurt, but at
least it won't hurt. So, it's really not
going to. Um I also I also want to take the moment to check and see if
anything's burning or melting. I don't think so cuz I'm using the squid. Looks
good. Yeah, it seems finer. Smells good. Yeah. Yeah, it smells 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. Doesn't fit anything.
It's just sitting. Yeah, it just sits on top. It's going to fit the 580. It's
blocking your flow through there. You took the screws out. 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. Yeah. 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. So, 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. 1080p. 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 XCSS2. Um, it's supposed
to be pretty good. And I'm not I'm not
expecting the same level of quality that I'm getting now. I'm going to go to to
low, maybe medium, probably 1440p, maybe
even 1440p upscaling from
1080p. But, you know, I just I want to
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, "Let's not make too many of these." Oh, wait. It's actually good.
Oh, where's our other shipments? Another
thing I'm pretty excited about. Okay, I'm going to let you finish, but is that
a piece of masking tape holding your SSD in? Oh, yeah. I couldn't find I couldn't
find the screw, the M.2 screw. Um, hey,
it still works. It detects. I've never had a single issue with this SSD being
in the bot. Sorry. What were you excited about?
Losing the squid. Oh, yeah. Cuz I have these nice custom cables. Yeah. That
totally don't suit the build anymore, but you know, they look pretty. The RGB
back plate for the GPU actually fits like perfectly now. It It breaks your
pass 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 um 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. I mean, it's a little better now that that 4090 is 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 huck 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 going to be
as easy as everyone else makes it.
With 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 I'm not worried about driver support. I'm worried just
strictly about performance. Yeah, I don't need a monitor. Oh, that's why I
set it up here. Oh. You look ready to go. You know, I'm
ready to game. I've got uh my drivers are all up to date. 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 going to try first? Batro. Batro. Think it'll handle it? I think it'll
handle Batro. If Batro can run on phones, it can run on a B580. Uh, one
nice thing is this is basically literally the monitor that I have at
home. And uh, 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 Batro. Go. Let's confirm
this is better than your 4090. Well, better. I don't know. Okay. Well, let's
whatever. It runs Bolatro. Great. I'm not going to I'm not going to keep going with Bolatro. Uh, Dota. I'm curious
though because uh we do know I play a lot of Dota. Mhm. You know, some people
said that, "Oh, what does this guy need a 5090 for? All he plays is Dota."
That's not true. I might have a lot of hours in Dota, but that's over like
years score. This looks 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. 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
sync that I would normally have on. Okay, we're not in game. It's already
struggling a bit. Like, this doesn't usually uh 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 at 40%.
That's why. That's why. 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 Hz like my monitor supports, but like 150 in a MOA,
that seems pretty. That's fine. And this is totally playable. Let's try seven
rebirth. This is going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 let's just take a look see. It looked like it might have
been set to 4K. Yeah, it is set to 4K. VSync on. 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 It's cool. Uh,
want to 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. I'll turn 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. Fine. Totally fine. This is fine. Okay.
Okay. I'm I'm feeling pretty good about this already. David, you ready? No. I
don't know what 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 it 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 resizable bar. It did fix itself after a while,
but it also, for whatever reason, reverted my display to 60 Hz.
All right, we're on Path of Exile now. Yeah, it's got XCSS support. Yeah. Okay,
I went down to balanced. Uhoh. 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%s. 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 mouse. Yeah, but it doesn't it doesn't auto switch
yet. Oh, okay. I died. But 80 plus, you
know, 1%s are dipping. It actually 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. Will you appreciate your 4090 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 freaking graphics card? No, I don't think most people know
how to enable rebar um update their BIOS or update their
BIOS. People watching these videos probably do, but but you know, stay
cool, guys. Man, that's a good looking PC and with
that white GPU. Yeah, love it. Cloud uh
storage is kind of the best because I can switch between my Steam Deck and my PC uh 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 cuz 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 like 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 like file to save.
It does it automatically and it like it'll ask you if you want to overwrite
and then you can say no and figure it out. But it's it'd be nice if I could
like 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 I played with 1080p
FSR at home cuz I sit fairly far away
from my computer. So FSR balanced. I guess it's just Ew. You're not playing
with motion blur on, are you? Yeah, I like motion blur because I want my games
to look like movies in motion. The clarity is definitely reduced, but we're
also inches from a 65 in display. That's
fair. Like, go 10 ft away and tell me how it looks. Okay, I'm going to sit at
what would be a comfortable distance. Okay, you know what? It's fine. Yeah,
fine. I'll allow it. It looks a little
like jittery and low FPSy, but I think that's just cuz you're on a mouse. It's
okay. Don't worry. We will all be judging you. Let's judge him.
Not fair. I don't have a control. Oh god.
This is actually totally fine. Not even that much worse than it was. Like I was
at a lock 60 and this is, you know, 5253. Um, and so I'll have to tinker
with the settings a little bit because I'm playing on a nonVRR display. But
still, I'm actually pretty impressed. This is very usable and looks really
good. Are you actually rendering at 4K? It looks No, no, no, no. This is 1080p.
Okay. This is uh 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 got to get it
close. Well, the fact that I'm 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
really on anything. No, it looks fine. It's going to be an interesting month,
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