Videocardz reports that Sparkle, one of Intel’s AIB partners, is reportedly creating a new lineup of low-profile graphics cards called the Genie series, including low-profile flavors of the Arc A380 and A310. These new cards will target the mainstream consumer market, featuring dual-fan cooler designs.
It might be strange to see new low-profile GPU options in a world where many mini-ITX cases can now support massive triple-slot gaming GPUs. However, many newer and older systems still support the compact PCIe standard. As a result, there is still demand for these low-profile GPUs since these cards provide the only way to increase GPU horsepower with low-profile machines.
Sparkle’s new low-profile graphics cards will come with a respectably sized dual-fan, dual-slot cooler design extending to the end of the PCIe connector. The dual-slot design will make the card a bit thicker than single-slot solutions, but the cooler’s short length should make it fit in any case that supports a 16-lane device. Once we get these cards in for review, we’ll know how well their cooling performance is, but expect good performance anyways since Sparkle’s dual-slot cooler design is substantially beefier compared to its industrial low-profile A310 graphics card that is equipped with a much skinnier single-slot single-fan cooling solution.
The new Genie cards also come with three display outputs, including a single HDMI connection and two Mini-DisplayPort connections, making these GPUs an excellent solution for powering several additional monitors.
Don’t expect serious gaming performance out of the Arc A380 and A310. Both GPUs are part of Intel’s entry-level GPU segment featuring just 8 Xe cores and 6 Xe cores, respectively. We’ve covered Arc’s A380 several times before, but if you haven’t heard of the Arc A310, it is a newish entry-level GPU option Intel quietly launched late last year. The A310 is even less powerful than the A380, featuring a cut-down ACM-G11 die with 6 enabled Xe cores, 4GB of GDDR6 memory, and a 64-bit memory bus. It is essentially Intel’s version of the GT 1030 but with a much newer GPU architecture and AV1 encode/decode support. (Albeit it is faster as well.)
The only unfortunate news is that Sparkle did not announce any release date for these GPUs. Hopefully, the Intel AIB will release these cards sooner than later, but there’s no guarantee.
