ASRock Challenger OC Arc B570 review: too little, too late

Following on from the success of Arc B580, Intel’s second Battlemage graphics card is here in the form of Arc B570. As its name suggests, this is a cutdown version of its sibling but comes with a lower price. The £200 / $200~ market is in desperate need of a fresh face, now long-forgotten by both AMD and Nvidia, making this pixel pusher a potentially attractive purchase for many. While it has its merits, the truth of Arc B570 isn’t so rosy nor simple.

On the surface, Arc B570 has the chops to handily trade blows with rivals like GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600. Its BMG-G21 GPU isn’t that much weaker than Arc B580, and its 10GB VRAM buffer and memory bandwidth runs circles around the competition. While the card does manage this on occasion, there are other forces at work against it that diminish its value both at present and for the future.

Specifications

There’s no direct predecessor that Arc B570 succeeds, naturally placing a greater spotlight on comparisons to Arc B580. Intel uses the same BMG-G21 GPU across both cards but cuts back some specifications on the former. The company additionally reduces clock speeds and memory capacity, alongside narrowing the interface. In theory, these are all reasonable cuts in service of a lower price point, netting lower power consumption as an added bonus.

	ASRock Challenger OC Arc B570	Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition
Released	Jan 2025	Dec 2024
Codename	Battlemage	Battlemage
Process	TSMC N5	TSMC N5
GPU	BMG-G21	BMG-G21
Transistors	19.6 billion	19.6 billion
Die size	272mm²	272mm²
Xe cores	18 of 20	20 of 20
Render slices	5	5
Ray tracing units	18	20
XMX AI engines	144	160
Base clock	2,600MHz	2,670MHz
Boost clock	2,850MHz	2,850MHz
Memory	10GB (GDDR6)	12GB (GDDR6)
Mem. interface	160-bit	192-bit
Mem. bandwidth	380GB/s	456GB/s
Peak TOPs	203	233
TBP	150W	190W
Launch MSRP	£250 / $230	£249 / $249

Diving into the specifics of the specifications, Arc B570 retains the same five render slices as its beefier sibling but features two (10%) fewer Xe cores for a total of 18. This translates to mirrored reductions elsewhere, including ray tracing units (18) and XMX AI Engines (144). Meanwhile, graphics clock speed comes in at 2,500MHz, a touch below the 2,670MHz clock of Arc B580. Smaller specs beget slimmer power draw, with Intel budgeting 150W for its new card by default.

The changes that more definitively separate Arc B570 from its bigger brother, however, stem from the makeup of its memory. The card boasts 10GB of GDDR6 running at 19Gb/s and riding on a 160-bit interface, for a total of 380GB/s of bandwidth. While this falls considerably short of its sibling’s capabilities, the pixel pusher is still a cut above the relatively thin configurations of Radeon RX 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060.

There’s no ‘Limited Edition’ coming from Intel for Arc B570, meaning it’s up to board partners to deliver reference specifications. This isn’t the case with ASRock Challenger OC which offers clock speed boosts of 100MHz out of the box for £250 / $230, a 5-13% bump in price relative to MSRP (£219 / $219). There’s no danger of the card treading on its sibling’s toes, though. Arc B580 Limited Edition stock is all but evaporated, placing pronounced pressure on ASRock to deliver value relative to similarly priced alternatives.

Design

ASRock has recently refreshed the look of its Challenger Series graphics cards, first debuting with Arc B580 and seen here again with Arc B570. It’s not a major shift in approach but the final appearance of the cooler is subtler and more pleasing to my eye relative to prior designs.

There’s a surprising amount of dimension on display at the front of Challenger OC Arc B570, with varying heights and materials that help elevate its monochrome colour palette. Complementing its plastic body are dashes of reflective acrylic and kevlar-esque cut-outs with predominantly sharp edges, all of which come together to give an industrial flair.

The card features two of ASRock’s ‘Striped Axial Fans’. The ridged frosted plastic material of each blade subtly pops against the surrounding frontplate and aluminium heatsink below. The brand claims its design enhances airflow relative to standard fans. I’ll discuss cooling performance in detail later in this review but for now I’ll say they have good cooling chops.

Flipping the Challenger OC Arc B570 on its side, there’s a thin RGB LED strip that occupies about a third of the card’s length, nestled beneath the printed white ASRock logo. You can toggle it on or off via a small switch tucked away underneath the backplate, if you’d prefer a completely stealthy pixel pusher.

All Arc B570 graphics cards use a single 8-pin PCIe cable for power delivery, and ASRock’s offering is no exception. This makes it easy to slot it into builds sporting lower-wattage power supplies with fewer PCIe cables.

In terms of display outputs, Arc B570 serves up three DisplayPort 2.1 inputs in addition to a sole HDMI 2.1 port. This is a welcomingly modern assortment of connections, even if this budget card won’t be able to push any of them to their limits. Still, it’s more than capable of handling a typical dual-monitor setup for games and tertiary applications like a web browser or Discord.

Performance

Given Arc B570 is largely similar in its makeup to Arc B580, I’ve adopted the same approach to benchmarking it. Below, you’ll find frame rates captured at FHD (1080p) and QHD (1440p) using one of the Club386 7950X3D test systems. Bare in mind that these frame rates will be slightly higher than reference performance, due to ASRock Challenger OC’s overclocks.

I’ll be reusing the same frame rate data captured during my initial Arc B580 review for comparison points to Arc B570. I’ve confirmed that subsequent driver performance since that card’s launch haven’t notably impacted performance nor, sadly, addressed prior issues.

3DMark

3DMark proves a mixed battleground for Arc B570. Starting strong, the card pulls ahead of all its competition bar its Battlemage sibling in the rasterised realms of Steel Nomad. However, it can’t muster the same impressive performance once ray tracing enters the fold. In Speed Way, it falls from its prior second place position to second-last, beating only GeForce GTX 1060 which was never a contender in this particular race to begin with. Even Arc A750 handily and embarrassingly bests it.

It’s clear that Arc B570’s reduced memory bandwidth relative to Arc B580 severely impacts its ray tracing performance. Combine this with apparent overhead issues at either an architectural or driver-level, and I believe this can account for the surprisingly low score in Speed Way. In fact, there’s another benchmark that supports this trail of thought that I’ll touch on soon.

Gaming

Arc B570 falls behind its more-expensive competition in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, both at FHD and QHD. While the gaps between it and others are more pronounced at lower resolutions, it’s only a few frames behind when cranking the pixels higher.

I’m happy to see a marked improvement in Arc B570 relative to Arc A750 here at both resolutions. It’s also worlds away from the near-decade old GeForce GTX 1060 that 3% of Steam users still rock at the time of writing.

Incompatibilities surrounding Variable Rate Shading (VRS) hamper Arc B570 in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 as they did Arc B580. Despite the fact that each card supports the technology, there’s been no progress in addressing the issue here. I haven’t had any response from Intel regarding this matter in the past month either.

The frame rates above serve less as direct performance comparisons because of this. Nonetheless, they do act as a reminder that opting for Arc still unfortunately comes with some quirks despite Intel’s continued efforts.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the closest thing Arc B570 has to a victory so far. The card annihilates both Radeon RX 7600 and Arc A750 at FHD and QHD and is 1-2fps short of matching GeForce RTX 4060.

Of course, this is sans any upscaling or frame generation. Both AMD and Nvidia benefit from CD Projekt Red’s support for FSR 3 and DLSS 3 (soon to be 4). Intel, meanwhile, has XeSS Super Resolution and can rely on FSR Frame Generation but there’s no sign of its own take on the tech hitting Night City anytime soon.

Running at QHD, Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail provides Arc B570 with another positive result, surpassing Radeon RX 7600 and Arc A750. It comes tantalisingly close to GeForce RTX 4060’s average performance, but misses out by a hair. Still, it punches above its weight in the MMO.

Arc B570 concedes ground to Radeon RX 7600 at FHD, but the resolution also highlights problems with Intel’s frame consistency. While average frame rates across all Arc graphics cards at each resolution are nice and high, their minimum frame rate is considerably lower than competitors. Such stark differences manifest in the form of stuttering, spoiling what should be a buttery-smooth experience at over 100fps.

Through Forza Motorsport, the problems exhibited in 3DMark Speed Way and Final Fantasy XIV combine and result in nothing short of a disastrous result at QHD. Even with more VRAM and a higher bandwidth relative to GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600 on its side, Arc B570 crumbles under the weight to the point that even Arc A750 delivers a higher minimum and average frame rate. To be clear, Arc B580 is the only card that can reliably perform under these intense ray traced conditions without fear of a memory leak, but the extent to which its sibling falters is disappointing to say the least.

Results improve but still aren’t perfect at FHD. A photo finish does see the card pass Radeon RX 7600 at this resolution in average frame rates but its minimums spoil what should be a unabashed point of celebration.

Although Arc B570 finds itself at the back of the pack in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, it nips at the heels of GeForce RTX 4060 at QHD with six frames per second separating the two cards. The gap becomes much larger at FHD, growing to 17fps against Nvidia’s budget champion.

Curiously Arc A750 shows up B570 at both resolutions. It’s unclear why the more aged architecture has the edge here where it expectedly trails its successor in every other gaming benchmark. Regardless, given the issues described elsewhere I can only suspect they’re at play here also.

Holding its own against its rivals, Arc B570 is close to a dead ringer for both GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600 in Rainbow Six Extraction running at QHD. Dropping to FHD more distinctly separates the three cards, resulting in Intel once again trailing behind AMD and Nvidia, but it’s largely a moot difference at frame rates this high.

It’s worth nothing that Arc B570 (and B580) supports Intel’s new XeLL (Low Latency) technology. It’s essentially the company’s answer to AMD Anti-Lag and Nvidia Reflex, improving system latency by reprioritising render queues to deliver the most up-to-date frames, making it easier to land that clutch play. While game integration should improve over time, there’s a driver-level alternative that you can enable via Intel Graphics Software.

Vitals

Comparing Arc A750 power consumption to its B Series successors, it’s clear that Intel has made significant strides in improving the efficiency of its graphics cards. Arc B570 should be the least-power hungry of the two pixel pushers the company has launched thus far thanks to its 150W TDP but that’s not the case here. Overclocks typically require more power to remain stable, so it should come as no surprise that ASRock’s Challenger OC pulls more watts, but I wasn’t expecting to see it eclipse the reference Arc B580.

Frustratingly, Intel still hasn’t addressed issues concerning high idle power consumption. This makes for a doubly unflattering comparison to GeForce RTX 4060, which demands markedly fewer watts from the wall while under load and idle.

If there’s one arena that Intel claims outright defeats its opponents it’s thermals. Running at a cool 55°C under load, ASRock’s Challenger cooler design certainly doesn’t leave me wanting. To put that into context, it’s five degrees chiller than GeForce RTX 4060 and a whopping 14°C lower than Radeon RX 7600. Much as I loved my GeForce GTX 1060, I greatly appreciate how much cooler most modern graphics cards run.

All that said, I am curious to see how hot Arc B570 could get with a smaller heatsink. The PCB isn’t particularly large and perhaps just right for single fan design, which could result in more affordable if slightly hotter models.

Challenger OC knows it keeps Arc B570 cool and doesn’t need to shout about. Every tenth of a decibel here matters in this contest, though you’re unlikely to hear any tangible difference between any of the 32-33db cards.

Once again, I’m curious to see how much faster and noisier (if at all) a single fan would need to spin to keep Arc B570 cool.

XeSS 2

I’ve already discussed what XeSS 2 is and how it works in my Arc B580 review, and I strongly recommend reading it if you want to more intimately familiarise yourself with the technology. For everyone else, the TL;DR is that Intel now has its own frame generation solution to complement its existing upscaling technologies which is packages together under the ‘XeSS 2’ banner.

At the time of writing, F1 24 is the only game to support the full XeSS 2 suite but more games are coming in the near future including the likes of Marvel Rivals, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, and more. As such, I’ll be focussing on how it affects image quality and performance on Arc B570 in this game rather than making sweeping statements about it owing to the lack of comparison points.

	Average fps	+/- vs. Native
Native (QHD)	41fps	N/A
XeSS (Performance)	66fps	+61%
XeSS-FG	73fps	+78%
XeSS (Perf) + FG	116fps	+282%

Running F1 24 at native QHD, Ultra High settings, on Arc B570 isn’t an ideal experience with average frame rates clocking in at 41fps. Thankfully, both XeSS upscaling and frame generation on their lonesome pick up the slack and push performance north of 60fps, which is the minimum frame rate I’d deem acceptable for a racing game. Combining their powers to work together, the graphics card sees a complete transformation, delivering an awesome 116fps. That’s a 282% improvement relative to native.

Comparing the quality of generated frames to the pre-release build I had to hand, there are some improvements. Rays from the track lights and their poles are more stable, as are the ever-difficult pixel thin lines that make up chain link fences. However, this has seemingly come at the cost of performance with Arc B580 performing slightly slower with this full release version of XeSS 2. Even so, the effect the suite has on performance remains transformative and I look forward to seeing it spread to other titles.

Overclocking

While still technically in beta, Intel Graphics Software’s ‘Tuning’ tab offers several means of tuning and overclocking B570 and other Arc GPUs.

Through this menu, I’m able to boost Arc B570’s power limits by 12%. This is down from the 20% uplift I was able to implement on Arc B580. This warrants a more cautious approach, boosting frequency by 100MHz and memory speed to 20Gb/s.

Unsurprisingly, such a piddly overclock makes little difference to my frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077, boosting average fps by a single digit. However, pushing this Challenger OC model any further results in system instabilities. This isn’t a poor reflection on ASRock as it sells this card with an overclock ready to go out of the box, effectively doing some (if not all) of the hard work for you.

Conclusion

It pains me to say it but I can’t recommend Arc B570 as its positive points come with far too many caveats. I commend Intel in its continued efforts to lift up the VRAM capacity and memory bandwidth of the budget market, but they don’t matter if performance problems elsewhere effectively nullify these advantages. Improvements to CPU overhead and frame rate consistency can’t come soon enough but there’s no estimation on when these fixes will deliver, if at all.

£30 / $30 seperates Arc B570’s MSRP from that of its beefier sibling, B580. I understand that every cent and penny you can scrimp together matters at this price point, making their value paramount. Were this gap slightly wider, perhaps £50 / $50, then the value of Arc B570 would be readily apparent. As things stand, you’re better off stretching your budget that little bit further for a graphics card that offers more value.

Making matters worse for Intel, prices of Radeon RX 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060 are continuing to fall and stock remains readily available for both rivals. Nevermind the fact that Radeon RX 9060 and GeForce RTX 5060 cards will likely show face in the coming months. This wouldn’t be as large a problem had Arc B570 arrived on the scene much earlier as was initially planned. Sadly, in the here and now, it feels like too little, too late.

Verdict: Arc B570 packs an attractive 10GB VRAM buffer at a low price, but it struggles to provide tangible value relative to its Battlemage sibling and rival graphics cards.