An Intel Arc Alchemist card smiles for the camera

A crisp and clear picture of an upcoming Intel Arc Alchemist GPU was released by Twitter user @SquashBionic (via Videocardz). The picture shows an engineering sample, and we can glean several details from it.

The card looks to be just about production ready, with none of the messy soldering that you might find on a development board, though there is what is probably a debug port just above the PCIe connector. The PCB is about ¾ the length of the cooler, which means the cooler can direct some air into the path of front to back airflow of most modern cases.

The PCB itself features what looks like eight memory pads, which would point towards a 16GB 256-bit memory configuration. The capacitor arrangement under the GPU is large, plus there’s the strong looking VRM with six and eight-pin power connectors. When added to the power provided by a 16x PCIe slot, we’re looking at a total board power of 300W. All of this point towards this being a high end Arc card.

If it is the high end card, then we’d say we’re pleased that Intel hasn’t applied brute force to wring every last drop of performance out of it. A sub 300W high end card is reasonable by today’s standards.

The performance of the card under a proper gaming workload remains unknown, but looking at the healthy state of this PCB, it's likely that the hardware engineering is mostly complete, with perhaps just BIOS optimizations and driver tuning to come.

We have a few hints regarding its performance, with a SiSoft Sandra entry indicating the card could beat the RTX 3070 Ti. If it can do that, and Intel can offer it at a competitive price, Gamers should find themselves happy to buy it.

We can expect more and more news as the launch of Intel's Arc graphics card range closes in. We'll be all over it.