GPU Intel's new discrete display card

[tinyitx]

Good that Intel demonstrates their new DG1 Xe in the mini format. The appearance looks good and sexy. I wonder if the shroud is actually metallic and serves a functional purpose as a heatsink to cool some internal components or is just a plastic silver colour shroud.
Backplate looks good too. Always good to have more competition.

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[Valantar]

Good that Intel demonstrates their new DG1 Xe in the mini format. The appearance looks good and sexy. I wonder if the shroud is actually metallic and serves a functional purpose as a heatsink to cool some internal components or is just a plastic silver colour shroud.
Backplate looks good too. Always good to have more competition.

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This is purely a developer card distributed to allow for software to be developed with good support for the upcoming retail GPUs series (including IGPUs) which will in all likelihood not share this design. As such speculating about the shroud is a bit meaningless.

Looking at photos (not renders) it looks like the shroud is cast aluminium (plastic would look smoother and have speckled metallic paint look if it was painted silver), which I guess is "functional" in that it looks reasonably good and thus has a purpose for PR. Beyond that, isn't any shroud that guides airflow functional? Aluminium shrouds definitely don't improve cooling (they're normally not connected to anything hot). Having the front shroud directly connected to anything hot on the board would make mounting needlessly complicated.

I agree that it's good to see more competition appear in the GPU space though. I'm doubtful as to how well they will be able to do on their first try, but I guess we'll see.

 

[confusis]

It's a good start, but with the demo at CES having issues keeping a steady frame rate with Warframe (1080p, according to Anandtech), I'd like to see an increase in perf before it hits market, even if it is targeting the mid-low end.

 

[VegetableStu]

i think the main aim of the alpha release is to make sure anything runs on their graphics architecture consistently (e.g. no severe frame drops), so i'd reckon they'd start beefing up for the consumer release ._.

wouldn't expect the stars for intel considering this is their entry release, but i'd say they would do a great job if they match the lower half of the radeon 5k stack o_o