Asrock Arc B570 Challenger OC: Intel's graphic card sorcerer's apprentice tested

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Just over a month after the preliminary Battlemage flagship Arc B580, the slimmed-down version B570 is launched on the market. We took one of the partner cards, the Asrock Arc B570 Challenger OC, into the lab for a first test run. At the start of sales, the graphics card is 50 euros cheaper than the comparable B580 model.

The Asrock card has 10 gigabytes of GDDR6 graphics memory and its BGM-G21 graphics chip clocks at 2600 megahertz as standard. It is therefore 100 MHz faster than Intel's basic version. In our tests, however, the clock rate was consistently even higher at 2750 MHz and thus at the peak clock rate specified by Intel for this model.

The Challenger OC occupies two slots and is quite compact at just under 25 centimeters in length. It's cooler with the two 95 millimeter fans, protrudes 2.6 centimeters above the slot panel. The rear is protected by a metal backplate. An LED strip adorns the top of the card next to the Asrock lettering; it can be deactivated using a slider.

We have already dedicated a detailed section to the technology of the Battlemage chip in the Intel Arc B580 review.

Display and video engine

The second generation of Intel Arc GPUs controls up to four 4K screens at the same time and usually has an HDMI socket and three display ports. The HDMI connection complies with the 2.1a specification and should even be able to drive 8K displays at 120 hertz – We were unable to test this due to the lack of a suitable monitor. However, the bit rate of 13.5 Gbit/s per lane (UHBR13.5) advertised as “up to” can only be achieved by one of the three display ports; the other two are limited to UHBR10, which is still sufficient for 4K144. When asked, Intel said that the partners decide for themselves whether they also offer a DP with UHBR13.5 for their cards. Asrock does this with the B570 Challenger OC, the “good” DisplayPort is connected to the middle of the three sockets.

The CPU load for video playback and video encoding is at the same high level as its predecessor and also includes AV1 encoders as well as other modern formats.

Like their predecessors, the Arc B500 cards are only suitable to a limited extent for those upgrading significantly older PCs. Intel specifies the Core i-10000 generation with a 400 series chipset and functioning “resizable bar” function as a minimum, or alternatively at least a Ryzen 3000 (not G!) with a 500 series chipset and the corresponding AMD “Smart Access Memory” function. There are also signs that the Battlemage cards with weaker CPUs lose a disproportionate amount of performance. We will look into this in a separate article at a later date.

Loudness and power consumption

The cooling system has the heat development of the Asrock Challenger OC firmly under control at all times. As usual, the fans are mostly stationary in idle mode and do not generate any additional noise. As they start to rotate at 52 °C, they sporadically started up briefly at an inaudible 430 revolutions per minute in the test if the energy-saving options are not used. This increased to up to 1120 rpm under full load, but even then the card could hardly be heard from the casing. Our measuring device in a low-noise insulated room showed a very good 0.2 sone with a sound pressure of 20.2 dB(A).

One of the major criticisms of the entire first Arc generation was the excessively high-power consumption in idle mode, i.e., when the card only had to display the Windows desktop. Intel's second Arc generation B500 can do this better. However, it is still necessary to activate the native PCIe power management ASPM including the L1 states in the BIOS setup and also to set the “Connection state power management” for PCI Express to “Maximum energy savings” in the Windows energy saving plans. This worked reliably on most of our test systems, unlike with the previous Arc-A series.

With the aforementioned energy-saving settings, the Asrock Arc B570 Challenger OC only needed a good 5 watts for a Full-HD display with 60 Hertz via Displayport, and 6 watts via HDMI. With two Full-HD displays, the power consumption rose to 11 watts and with three to 17 watts. 4K screens were 12 (1 screen) to 22 watts (2 monitors), with 1 × 120 Hertz at 20 watts. With 144 Hertz in 4K or in mixed mode, the energy-saving tricks were virtually ineffective.

Without these tricks, the idle power consumption was still a high 32 to 34 watts, regardless of whether a Full-HD display with 60 Hz was connected, a 4K144 display or a mixed triple. They also did not affect the card's power consumption under load. This was up to 153 watts in 3D scenes and thus just above the total board power of 150 watts promised by Intel; Asrock has obviously given the OC version a few watts more. Individual peaks in the millisecond range reached up to 164 watts, but are more relevant for power supply dimensioning than for the electricity bill anyway.

In the full load test with Furmark, we measured 172 watts with peaks of 187 watts. The PEG and eight-pin connection still have plenty of room for improvement in both cases.