Intel Arc Scavenger Hunt Hints At Alchemist Graphics Card Pricing, Let's Break It Down
Back when Intel first announced the Xe HPG Scavenger Hunt in October of last year, we did some analysis on the value of each award to estimate the retail pricing of the cards. Now that the contest is over, winners have received e-mails confirming their prizes as well as the actual retail value of the rewards in question.
In fact, our very own Tim "Paw Diddy" Sweezy won one of the Grand Prizes in the scavenger hunt, earning him a "Premium" Arc graphics card, along with some merch and a 6 month Xbox Game Pass subscription. Intel's e-mail, which you can see most of below, values this package at some $900.
If we subtract the cost of the Game Pass subscription, we end up at $840. It's difficult to imagine the swag being valued at more than $100, so we're probably looking at a graphics card in the range $749-799 here. Presumably, based on what we know (and what we think we know) about Intel's first-generation desktop Arc graphics cards, that card will be the "A780" or similar.
Other folks have posted their own results from the contest on Twitter. La Frite David (@davidneco25320) won himself a "Performance" Arc graphics card, along with some unspecified Intel merch and a 3 month Xbox Game Pass sub. Intel assigned that package a retail value of $700, as you can see in his tweet:
yea pic.twitter.com/ikl0WN8pnU
— La Frite David 🇫🇷 (@davideneco25320) April 28, 2022
If you were in the Scavenger Hunt and you have not heard from Intel, you may want to head over to Intel's Gaming Access website and verify that your account is set up for promotional e-mails. According to mattbop on the Discord for the contest, due to the way the system is set up, users who opted out of e-mail newsletters did not receive their congratulatory e-mail messages with details of what they won.
To be frank, even $749 is pretty steep for GeForce RTX 3070 Ti performance without GeForce drivers. You can find new RTX 3070 Ti cards for $699 on Amazon right now, and anecdotal reports have Micro Center stocking the cards at $649. Sure, both are still far above the MSRP of $599, but an Arc card had better bring something pretty special to the table if it's got that kind of price-performance ratio. On the other hand, the rumored 16GB of RAM is pretty special.
Intel's promised desktop Arc graphics cards for Q2 this year, so they should be announced in no more than eight weeks from now. After seeing what the low-end mobile parts can do, we're eager to see what Intel has to offer with its first-generation Arc desktop graphics.
