Our Verdict
With its low-profile casing and gentle power draw, the Intel Arc Pro B50 may find its way into many smaller workstation PCs. It’s a great upgrade over integrated graphics and has plenty of VRAM for running AI models, but it doesn’t produce the same rendering results as rival cards, some of which can be cheaper too.
For
- Low profile
- Low power consumption
- Four monitor outputs
Against
- Costs more than a gaming card
- And it's less powerful
- Bracket tricky to change
Why you can trust Creative Bloq Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Intel’s graphics cards might not get the same sort of press as Nvidia’s (and let’s not forget AMD makes them too) but its 2024 Xe2 ‘Battlemage’ generation of GPUs took a distinct step forward, its gaming cards took on popular GeForce cards at 1440p gaming.
This card is a little different. It’s a low-profile workstation card with a hefty 16GB of VRAM on board, and it’s going to be going up against cards like the Nvidia A1000 as a slot-in upgrade for smaller desktop PCs and perhaps external docks too. Here’s how it stacks up.
Key specifications
Architecture: | Xe2 Battlemage |
Bus type: | PCIe 5.0 x8 |
Xe cores: | 16 |
Clock speed: | 1700 MHz (2600MHz boost) |
Memory: | 16GB GDDR6 |
Memory speed: | 14 Gbps |
Memory bandwidth: | 224 GB/s |
Power draw: | 70W |
Ports: | 4x Mini DisplayPort 2.1 |
Dimensions: | 167 x 69 x 40mm |
Slots: | 2 |
Design, build and display
• Low-profile
• Fiddly screws
The Arc Pro B50 board is a chunky little monster, taking up two PCIe slots in height but only measuring 69mm across. Out of the box, it comes with a low-profile bracket attached, and a full-sized one in the box. If you want to swap these over, you’ll need a T6 Torx screwdriver, and the screws themselves are tiny. Beyond this, it’s an easy enough board to fit as it doesn’t need a power feed from the PC’s PSU, taking all the juice it needs through its PCIe connector. This also means you won’t need a hugely powerful power supply in your PC, another bonus.
The blue colour on the back of the board is attractive, but completely hidden once it’s installed in your PC. What you’ll see instead is the backplate, with its four video outputs and a vent for the hot air blown out by the single cooling fan.
Because of its double-slot height, even though it’s a low-profile card, the B50 is going to require a bit more space than a truly tiny card like the A1000, but it will fit in most workstation PCs as well as external docks so that it can be used with laptops. There are drivers available for Windows and Linux, but no compatibility with Macs, or with Windows laptops using Snapdragon processors.
Design score: 4/5
Features
• Four monitor ports
• Lots of VRAM
With four Mini-DisplayPort connectors on the back, you’ll be able to attach the same number of monitors to the B50. That’s a big upgrade over using the (often) single output of an integrated graphics solution, and matches that found on most gaming cards. The Mini-DisplayPort sockets lend themselves to the small size of the card, but (at least in the package we received) there are no adapters in the box, so you’ll need either some converters for existing HDMI or DP cables, or some new cables altogether. Intel might like to switch to USB-C for updated versions of the card, as those ports are often found on monitors, and the cables are plentiful.
The Battlemage architecture is Intel’s second attempt at making a desktop graphics card after 2022’s Alchemist, and catches up with Nvidia and AMD in many areas. So you get ray-tracing cores, frame generation and XeSS upscaling that can increase the resolution of a game with little effect on its visual clarity. What matters more to creatives will be the card’s hefty 16GB of VRAM, which matches something like the RTX 5080 and means the B50 has to do a lot less swapping of data across the PCIe bus, something that can slow down your results. Intel is very keen that you have Resizable BAR (a BIOS setting that allows your CPU to access the GPU’s entire frame buffer at once rather than in 256MB chunks) enabled on your PC, and the GPU’s software will nag you about it if it’s turned off. It’s been shown to improve performance by as much as 50% in games using Intel GPUs, and is well worth switching on whatever card you’re using.
The Arc Pro software has some interesting features, including whether your GPU or monitor handles scaling when you’re outputting at a resolution that doesn’t match the screen’s native pixel count, and you can set profiles for various apps that set whether they use vsync to match their framerate to the display, or have a limit placed on the number of frames per second they can send to the screen. There's also an error-correcting option that detects corrupted data in the card’s memory, something we see in RAM for workstations and servers, too.
Feature score: 4/5
Performance
• Huge upgrade from integrated graphics
• Not as powerful as gaming cards
The integrated GPU on the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K has four Xe cores. The AMD Ryzen 9800X3D has two of its Radeon cores. The Intel Arc B580 desktop gaming card (which goes for less cash than the B50) has 20. Meanwhile, this Arc Pro B50 has 16. This is a crude comparison, because there are a lot of other factors that decide a GPU’s performance level, but it gives you a rough idea: the B50 should be much better than using a CPU’s integrated graphics, but won’t be as good as a full-fat gaming card.
And so it proves. Just like the Nvidia A1000, the B50 is an excellent card if you’re using Photoshop, beating the A1000 and the RTX 5060 in our tests. It drops off a bit after this, however: the B50 beats the Nvidia A1000 in the Geekbench 6 GPU test, but doesn’t come close to the RTX 5060, which is a cheaper (if larger) card. The Nvidia card almost doubles the Intel chip’s score.
It does well against integrated graphics, showing its usefulness as an upgrade if you’ve been struggling through creative tasks with just two or four cores at your disposal, especially in HEVC and AV1 encoding, where the Intel media engine is notable for supporting 10-bit 4:2:2 video. In Premiere Pro, the Intel GPU showed itself to be less good at raw video decoding and long GOP compression than Nvidia’s cards, but produced a better score for creating effects than the A1000. The RTX 5060 beat it in every category, however.
The 16GB of RAM means it’s capable of hosting small AI models locally, and the 170 peak TOPS give it some grunt in this area. In testing, it produced scores as much as 50% better than Nvidia’s A1000 and far higher than using the CPU’s integrated graphics. A similar result comes from the Steel Nomad gaming test, where the 16.6fps generated by the B50 looks good against the A1000’s 9.7fps, but the RTX 5060 will get you 56fps.
Performance score: 3/5
Price
At nearly £400 or $500, the Arc Pro B50 costs more than a modern mid-range gaming GPU with the same amount of VRAM, such as the RTX 5060Ti. These cards tend to be larger and more power-hungry, however, so if space is an issue, it can be worth shelling out on the smaller card.
Value score: 2/5
Who is it for?
• Workstation users
You’ll need a particular type of computer to consider this card, or possibly an external GPU dock. It’s low-powered and low-profile, so takes up much less space in a PC case than a gaming card. If you’re doing CAD or video work on a small PC, then it can make a great upgrade from integrated graphics, but won’t provide the same results as a larger, thirstier card.
Attributes | Notes | Rating |
|---|---|---|
Design: | A compact card with a low power draw | 4/5 |
Features: | Four monitor ports and good software. | 4/5 |
Performance: | Lots of VRAM, but slower than gaming cards | 3/5 |
Value: | A specialist card, and priced like one. | 2/5 |
Buy it if...
- Your PC demands a small card
- Your job demands lots of screens
- You need pro driver stability
Don't buy it if...
- You can fit (and power) a stronger card
- You want to spend less
- You’re interested in gaming first and foremost
out of 10
With its low-profile casing and gentle power draw, the Intel Arc Pro B50 may find its way into many smaller workstation PCs. It’s a great upgrade over integrated graphics and has plenty of VRAM for running AI models, but it doesn’t produce the same rendering results as rival cards, some of which can be cheaper too.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
