Everyone likes a fast graphics card, but it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Less powerful GPUs don’t even need bulky triple-fan coolers, but the market for compact graphics cards has gone largely unnoticed.
With this underserved market in mind, Asrock Intel Arc A380 Low Profile 6GB card. Inside, it’s a typical A380, featuring an ACM-G11 GPU with his 1,024 stream processors clocked at 2.0 GHz and 6 GB of his GDDR6 memory. It’s not a strong card like you’d expect at this edge of the market, but it does have some key features and one interesting feature.
This is a low profile card with a total board power of 75W. This means that it does not require external power and instead draws all power from the PCIe slot. We appreciate high-performance low-profile cards, but still need dual slots, and Asrock feels like they’ve gotten off the hook.
Asrock will say that the 75W TDP requires the use of a dual-slot cooler. I understand that point of view, but I’ve tested several low-profile cards over the years. Most recently the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6400. It has a low TDP of 53W, but it also has a single-fan cooler the size of a playing card, and it’s not impossible to double the area, so it can easily handle a TDP of 75W.
Having a dual-slot cooler isn’t a deal breaker, but the lack of access to cooling data seems like overkill. This makes it unusable in the most compact systems, especially those with custom-made cases. It features dual-slot card capacity in case something like a USB card or network card occupies a slot.
Think of an old off-the-shelf crappy office machine that you can reuse. Even the compact, clunky Dells and HPs of 10 years ago can be brought back to life with SATA SSDs and cards like the A380. It’s also basically plug-and-play, so you don’t need to change the power supply. As long as the system isn’t completely hampered by his 10 year old garbage Celeron with 2 cores and he 2 threads it works fine.
It’s worth mentioning that the Arc A380 has a key feature that makes it easier to use even on older systems, and that is the PCIe 4.0 x8 interface. The similarly performing RX 6400 runs at a wretched x4 which bottlenecks at PCIe 3.0 x4, let alone PCIe 2.0. That alone makes the A380 a good option for older systems.
Modern graphics-intensive games will have a hard time running at 1080p on the A380 without losing quality. But what if you want to play a bit of Fortnite or Overwatch or some less demanding but popular game?
Asrock has yet to reveal pricing for the Arc A380 Low Profile, but The ASRock Ark A380 Challenger is priced at $120There is no doubt that the low-profile model will be released at about the same price.
A380 is more than just a gaming card. It would be a reasonable upgrade for his PC in the living room, a media server, and even a PC in the office with dead graphics. I wish it was a single slot card.