This year there will be two phenomena in the world of hardware, the first is the use of the PCIe Gen 5 power connector or better known as ATX12VHPWR and the ARC Alchemist is the second. Well, one of the doubts was to know if both were going to hit Intel graphics cards at the same time and we finally have the answer.
There are still months to go before we see the first graphics cards for gaming based on Intel’s ARC Alchemist architecture, although we had a preview of them in their presentation on March 30, this was reduced to a vulgar photograph on a slide where we could see the standard model. That is, the one that Intel itself will sell directly. Well, one of the questions that had appeared in the forums was about the use of the ATX12VHPWR connector in the ARC Alchemist.
Since the new connector not only has the ability to power the graphics card at 450 W and 600 W, but also at 150 W or 300 W, we didn’t know if Intel was going to use the ATX12VHPWR or not. Well, we have finally been able to solve this question about its use in Intel graphics cards. In any case, Intel should have a graphics card in reserve to compete at the high end against NVIDIA and AMD. Of course, due to the proximity to the RTX 40 and the RX 7000, we rather assume that we are talking about an ARC Battlemage. Of the three architectures we expect all of them to use the new power connector for PCIe Gen 5.
Intel ARC Alchemists would not use the ATX12VHPWR connector
At least in principle, since we have been able to have a preview from the hand of Tom Petersen from Intel, who has granted an interview to the Hot Hardware medium and has made a very fleeting preview where he has shown the reference plate of the first Intel graphics for desktop after more than twenty years absent in that market.
In the image you can see 3 PCI Express power connectors of 8 pins each. Let’s not forget that each of them can deliver a power of 150 W and, therefore, we would be talking about 450W total combined power. What would make it possible in a final version to use the ATX12VHPWR connector to deliver those 450 W, in the same way that it happens with the recently launched NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti. However, due to their technical specifications and the fact that its performance would be close to the RTX 3070it seems to us that there is something fishy in what Petersen has shown.
The reason? Other sources have leaked the design of the first ARC Alchemists and you can see an 8-pin and a 6-pin connector on them. So added to the 75 W that the PCIe port gives by itself, this indicates that we are facing a graphics card below 300 W. Is the Intel engineer hinting at a recently introduced ARC BFGPU? Who knows, sooner or later Intel will have to compete against the high-end NVIDIA and AMD. In any case, we are not clear why Petersen has not shown the full graphics card.
