ASUS has entered Intel’s Arc graphics-card market with the UGen Arc Pro B70, a 32GB workstation card built for local AI inference and professional workloads. The launch marks ASUS’s first Arc-branded model after it sat out the Alchemist and Battlemage gaming generations, and brings a major board partner to Intel’s professional GPU lineup.
Key takeaways
- The UGen Arc Pro B70 uses Intel’s BMG-G31 “Big Battlemage” GPU with 32 Xe2 cores and 256 XMX engines.
- It has 32GB of ECC GDDR6 memory and is marketed for AI and workstation use, not as a gaming card.
- ASUS has not confirmed pricing or retail availability.
A workstation card built around memory capacity
The card pairs Intel’s BMG-G31 GPU with 32GB of ECC GDDR6 on a 256-bit interface, delivering 608GB/s of memory bandwidth. ASUS lists a boost clock of up to 2.8GHz and peak AI performance of 367 INT8 TOPS. That TOPS figure is a theoretical specification, not an independent benchmark result.
Cooling is handled by a dual-slot blower, a design suited to workstations with limited space or multiple cards. Reported board-power figures vary across coverage, ranging from 290W to 310W. The card includes three DisplayPort 2.1 outputs and one HDMI 2.1b port, along with a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface and 12V-2×6 power connector.
UGen targets local AI workloads
ASUS is positioning the B70 under its UGen AI brand rather than as a gaming product. The company says systems can use up to four cards for 128GB of combined VRAM and support models with as many as 120 billion parameters. That capacity is distributed across multiple GPUs; it does not make the system equivalent to one graphics card with 128GB of memory. Actual model support depends on quantization, software and how workloads are split across cards.
ASUS lists compatibility with tools including vLLM through Intel’s XPU backend, llama.cpp, Ollama, PyTorch with Intel’s IPEX extension, OpenVINO and oneAPI. Those options put the card in the growing market for organizations and developers seeking to run inference on local hardware rather than relying exclusively on cloud services.
ASUS returns to Intel graphics
ASUS previously released a passively cooled Intel Iris Xe DG1 card in 2021, but did not produce Arc Alchemist or consumer Battlemage graphics cards. The UGen B70 is therefore its first Arc-branded model, though its professional focus does not establish that gaming-focused Arc cards will follow.
Intel launched its reference Arc Pro B70 at $949, with US retail listings later reported closer to $1,300. ASUS has not announced a price or release date for its version, so its competitiveness will depend in part on where it lands relative to those existing listings and other workstation options.
Via ASUS