Intel Value King - WAN Show December 13, 2024

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by WAN Password. Imagine what your brain could remember if it didn't have to hold on to 100 different passwords. Free your brain from remembering passwords. Get WAN Password. WAN Password combines industry-leading security with award-winning design to bring private, secure and user-friendly password management to everyone. Don't let security slow your business down. Go to onepassword.com/technews to start your two-week free trial.

**Linus Sebastian** (0:29)
What's up everyone? Welcome to The WAN Show. We're going to be talking about all kinds of great stuff, but of course, the big headline topic is that Intel Arc doesn't suck. What happened? I don't know how to make sense of this world anymore because it doesn't suck and I'm excited and it's not just me. People are actually excited.

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:48)
The whole industry seems genuinely hyped over this.

**Linus Sebastian** (0:50)
We're building a gaming PC for the first time in flipping years. I know we already made a 16 and a half minute long video about Battlemage, but I want to talk about Battlemage some more.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:02)
Time to yap.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:03)
Especially some of the observations that I've made about people's comments on it and about people's viewership habits on our other videos as a result. Don't look at the doc.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:15)
He's trying to spoil. No, I didn't. I opened a new tab.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:17)
He's trying to spoil all the things.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:19)
You're hurting the laptop.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:20)
We're also going to be talking about the LTT and short circuit. Have they gone too far with the clickbait? The world, it turns out, is not actually upside down.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:33)
What?

**Linus Sebastian** (1:33)
Unless you're in Australia, in which case, it's not news.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:37)
Is the thumbnail good for them?

**Linus Sebastian** (1:39)
I think so. I think they can see it better. What else we got today?

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:45)
Oh, right, I'm supposed to do something now.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:48)
You're actually supposed to have the doc open and be looking at it.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:50)
Yeah, but you got mad at me, so I...

**Linus Sebastian** (1:52)
You didn't even have it open.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:53)
I opened YouTube. Okay, you can buy a car on Amazon, that's weird. And there's like almost no other topics.
Blu-Rays, BattleMage, Buying a Car. And hang out.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:22)
The show is brought to you today by MSI, Vessi, and Squarespace, and of course, our laptop partner LG, our rap partner dbrand, and our chair partner Secretlab. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic, which is of course, Intel Arc Battle Mage. Against all odds, it's great. Did you watch the video?

**Luke Lafreniere** (2:44)
Yes, well, yeah.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:46)
Well, I don't know. I don't know if you watch our review of a GPU.

**Luke Lafreniere** (2:49)
I was up at like eight talking to you about it, and I reviewed the video.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:52)
Okay, well, I don't pay attention to these things. Intel finally watched it. Wait, what do you mean?

**Luke Lafreniere** (2:56)
We weren't talking about it.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:57)
I know, but I-

**Luke Lafreniere** (2:58)
How do you not pay attention?

**Linus Sebastian** (2:59)
Do you have any idea how long my week's been this week? It's been crazy.

**Luke Lafreniere** (3:02)
I was really surprised you were up.

**Linus Sebastian** (3:04)
Yeah, well, I didn't have a choice.
I've been up at the beginning of days, I've been up at the end of days. It's been a very, very hectic week. Intel finally launched their anticipated Arc B580 GPU this Thursday, and across the board, reviewers and the public are impressed. It is built on the latest generation of Intel's Xe architecture and provides a great value with 12 gigs of VRAM, outstanding 1080p performance and even strong performance at 1440p. In our testing, it provided a 20% uplift over the RTX 4060 while undercutting the 4060 on price. At just $249, the card offers a compelling value if you can get one.

**Luke Lafreniere** (3:48)
One note I will put out there is some other reviewers, you know, we don't always test the same games, we don't always test the same games in the same way. Some other reviewers have found slightly different performance, like maybe the 4060 does pretty well in like some random title. Like if I remember correctly, Wendell said comparatively it did pretty well in Starfield or something. I don't know, maybe just check out his video.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:09)
I mean, dozens of people are playing Starfield. With that said, we don't necessarily choose games for our suite based on how many people are playing them. We have plenty of games in our suite that not a ton of people are playing. Because a lot of the time you're looking for consistency and you're looking for games that represent something. So they might represent, okay, we need to evaluate Vulcan performance. Or if there's a particular feature we want to look at, like ray tracing, we need a game that supports various implementations of supersampling. We need this, we need that. So a lot of the time the benchmark suite is not just down to what games people are playing, but it's down to what exactly it is we're trying to test.