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This Asus version of the DG1 is passively cooled – which will give you a hint where the DG1 sits in terms of raw GPU performance.
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This actively cooled version of the DG1 was built by ‘other partner’, who had previously incorrectly identified Intel as Colorful. No word yet on who really makes it.
Here at Ars, we’ve been talking for a while about Intel’s ultimate run in the desktop graphics market. This week, Intel announced the sale of Intel DG1 graphics cards to OEMs and system integrators for inclusion in prebuilt systems. So far, two variants of the DG1 have been announced at least in part – an Asus brand, passively cooled card and an actively cooled version of an unannounced seller.
If you are hoping to achieve a DG1 gray market and include it in your own system, you have no luck. Intel told LegitReviews that DG1 cards will only work on very specific systems, with custom UEFI (BIOS) supporting the card:
The Iris Xe discrete add-in card is connected to the 9th generation (Coffee Lake-S) and the tenth generation (Comet Lake-S) Intel® Core desktop processors and Intel (R) B460, H410, B365 and H310C chipset based motherboards and are sold as part of prefabricated systems. These motherboards require a special BIOS that supports Intel Iris Xe, so the cards are not compatible with other systems.
While this is disappointing news for reviewers like yours, it’s probably nothing to get upset about if you’ve an enthusiast looking for the next hot game GPU. Assuming that the leaked DG1 Fire Strike benchmarks in May 2020 are still accurate, it will not be close to breaking any records yet.
Think value, not pious
With a Fire Strike of 5,538, the Intel DG1 card of the May leak is faster than graphics graphics, but it’s slower than separate entry-level GPUs from AMD (RX 560) and Nvidia (GTX 1050), and it is not not even. almost equivalent to higher-end gaming GPUs. Of course, the leaked criteria were on a development version of the DG1, and it’s possible that the newly launched OEM version will be faster, but we do not expect that to be the case.
The OEM version may even be slower in hardware than the dev version was – the new OEM versions offer 80 execution units (EUs), while at least some versions of the dev cards had 96. Improving driver quality over the past eight months is likely to have a positive impact on performance, but we doubt it will change the card’s ultimate place in the market – the DG2 may be a different story, but DG1 seems to manage relatively cheap desks without the heavy game focus.
If Intel (and its partners) can produce the DG1 in significant volume and on time, it could end up being a thriving hit with OEMs despite mediocre performance – Nvidia’s GTX 1050 and AMD’s RX 560 are faster than you have it, but it is difficult to obtain. The GTX 1050 should be a $ 110 card – but today we could not find a new GTX 1050 for less than $ 300 on Amazon or for less than $ 180 on Newegg.
Both launched versions of the DG1 card include 4GB of LPDDR4X, support PCIe 4 (despite no Intel CPUs supporting it yet), and offer HDMI, DisplayPort, and dual-link DVI-D output with support for up to three simultaneous 4Ks screens.
We expect the DG1 cards to appear in the value-oriented desktop range of OEMs later in 2021.
List by Intel