Intel has recently shown a promotional video through its Twitter account in which it has shown how the design of the heatsink of its ARC gaming graphics will be. To do this, the company used 1,000 drones equipped with lighting to create various shapes, including of course a dual fan desktop graphics card with a design very similar to what we have already seen in previous leaks for an engineering sample of the DG2-512EU model.
Intel’s gaming GPU heatsink, ‘drawn’ by 1,000 drones
We’ve painted pixels in the sky with 1,000 Intel drones. Now, that’s a visual experience. What will you create next? https://t.co/FYeygLy6Oh #IntelArc #inteldrons #inteldronelightshows #dronelightshows pic.twitter.com/c0Q4ycNYVS
– Intel Graphics (@IntelGraphics) August 17, 2021
The two images that can be seen include a total of 9 blades in each of the two fans, which by proportions seem to be 92 or 100 mm in diameter to cool a set of aluminum sheets traversed by heat pipes with a traditional design. This would be a fairly “normal” heatsink design, not to say a little novel, as we have seen it for years in all types of graphics cards.
Now, seeing precisely this very traditional design of the heatsink for Intel gaming graphics and given that it is known that the top-of-the-range model will have an initial target TDP of 275 watts but that it will surely reach the 300 watts In a later variant, it honestly seems a bit insufficient to us, so most likely we will be faced with a heatsink that has to be running at high speed even at rest, making the graph noisy and very hot.
In any case, these are our speculations and at least we are grateful that Intel has opted for a dual fan heatsink and not for a model with a blower-type fan like the ones we saw in the early AMD Radeon models, which were indeed noisy and ineffective. Let us also remember that those 300W of TDP will only be seen in Intel’s top-of-the-range model, because from there it has other inferior models that will obviously have a lower TDP and therefore will heat up much less.
The first Intel ARC “Alchemist” products will begin shipping in Q1 2022, and from what we know so far the top-of-the-line model will feature 512 execution units paired with up to 16GB of GDDR6 memory, so in in technical terms it will be a GPU that rubs shoulders with the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti in terms of performance.
Intel is also preparing the competition for NVIDIA DLSS Y AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution with code name XeSS, and will include support for hardware real-time ray tracing across its entire lineup of graphics cards, so it seems pretty clear that, in the end, Intel does want to end the duopoly of AMD and NVIDIA in the graphics card market. and compete directly against both.
