Pictures of a new variant of the Intel Alchemist Arc A380 recently surfaced on the internet from a Chinese OEM. The Intel Arc A380 desktop Chinese OEM variant was soldered onto an MXM board designed mainly for mobile workstations and notebooks.
It’s been a while since we last saw an upgradable notebook or mobile workstation option, though the concept is still not yet dead. The Intel Arc A380 was put on an MCM 3.1 Type-A board that supports PCIe Gen 4 x8. Furthermore, the MXM variant of Intel Arc A380 also supports 6GB of GDDR6 memory with a 96-bit memory bus.
The most important feature of the Intel Arc A380 MXM is its tight power limit, which is limited to only 50W and can draw up to 75W. Aside from that, the cards come equipped with one Display Port and three HDMI outputs.
Users who can take advantage of the Intel Arc A380 MXM will also have support for Ray-Tracing and AV1 encoding. While gaming performance should be better than the AMD Radeon 6500 XT, just like the desktop Arc A380 variant.
A 50-75W power limit should also allow plenty of users who own a laptop with upgradeable graphics cards also to take advantage of the Arc A380 MXM.
However, there will always be some complications to upgrading a graphics card on a mobile platform compared to a desktop, like the power mentioned above limit or an entirely different display connection.
Still, getting a desktop variant of the Intel Arc A380 would be better than a laptop equipped with an Nvidia GTX 1650 or AMD RX 6400.
What are your thoughts on the Intel Arc A380 MXM? Would you invest in one if your laptop is compatible with MXM boards?
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