Intel’s Gaming Truck Accidentally Reveals New GPU Cooler Design?

This September, Intel will join the LANfest event set to take place in Castle Rock, CO with their newly inaugurated gaming truck. That’s it, the Intel ARC GPUs will finally make their first appearance on American soil during this event or the first appearance at all outside of China. Given the delayed release of Intel ARC, will Intel surprise us with an earlier announcement or even a release date?

Intel

According to the Intel Insiders Discord server, the truck will be equipped by a little more than 30 gaming stations composed of Intel NUC 12 Extreme Dragon Canyon, tiny systems based on the desktop Alder Lake CPU architecture and with support for discrete GPUs. Slots conveniently populated for the occasion by the new ARC Alchemist first discrete GPU architecture from Intel. Gamers will be able to playtest in avant-première these systems during the renowned LAN event.

Intel does not (yet) manufacture everything in a desktop computer and as such, has teamed up with other large gaming brands to sponsor the gaming systems. Extra hardware will be supplied: high end gaming monitors from AOC, gaming chairs from BackForce, and gaming mice, keyboards and headsets from Steelseries. This is top quality gaming battlestations to be seen inside the Intel Gaming Bus (it’s really a truck).

Gaming Truck

The teasing from Intel about the truck included some pictures of its outside, of the inside still a work in progress, and a few render images of the final result. The truck can open in half and reveal four rows of gaming PCs along the entire length, and is wrapped both on the inside and on the outside of the characteristic blue and purple signature color theme from the Intel Gaming division.

The truck is tagged with “Intel ARC High Performance Gaming”, despite rumors and first Chinese benchmarks of the cards stating their performance as low to medium end and plagued by major drivers issues. Clearly, Intel has something to say about it, and these new graphics cards are here to disprove the allegations. We can hope to see them coming with good drivers (for the truck).

The inside renders included in the teasing show a very interesting detail nonetheless: if you zoom on one of the screens with promotional material we can distinguish a yet-unreleased ARC GPU design, perhaps inadvertently. The cooler is totally different from the Limited Edition one previously revealed by Intel and we can safely assume this is the design they went with for the retail release. It looks unique and very good, we will wait to have it for an in-depth review of it.

So far, the actual release of Intel ARC has gone far from smoothly, with a few shows and announcements followed by a series of delays continuing to this day. This is about to be forgotten, as Intel recently quietly released first samples of the Intel ARC A380 desktop GPU in China and the cards are about to hit the shelves of the global market worldwide very soon. We might be able to learn more from Intel during the LANfest event and the tour of the gaming bus. Intel does seem to have a bunch of marketing ideas to drive up the hype.

What’s Next?

At this point, it’s good to see Intel is taking its time. This could most certainly result in the much-needed driver optimization to improve the not-so-impressive gaming performance of the GPUs we saw on the Chinese market. On the other hand, the two established giants of the GPU industry are both about to release their new series lineup, with Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series “Ada Lovelace” and AMD’s upcoming RDNA3 launch. Intel is running out of time to make a huge first impression, and they could play the low-power low-end GPUs segment that seem to be forgotten.

Meet the Intel Gaming Truck during the LANfest Colorado event on the 30th of September, at Castle Rock, Colorado.