Major AIB Partner Withdraws from Intel Arc GPUs Due to ‘Quality Concerns’?!

Intel is expected to start the launch of its Arc desktop graphics cards (in Western markets) before the end of this month with the entry-level focused A380 likely representing the first model to arrive. Following a number of reports from China, however, it seems pretty clear that although Intel is going to create their own ‘Founders Edition’ models, AIB partners are also going to be releasing their own custom variants too. A move that’s clearly not surprising since this is, after all, generally the nature of what we see from AMD and Nvidia GPU models too.

Following a report via Videocardz, however, a shocking rumour has appeared online stating that one major AIB partner has officially withdrawn from Intel Arc graphics cards citing (and this is the worrying bit) major quality concerns.

Major AIB Manufacturer Withdrawns From Intel Arc GPUs?

Although the specific AIB partner has not been named, a pretty significant hint has suggested that it is almost certainly MSI. Of course, we won’t know for sure until the Intel ARC GPUs are released and we can attempt to figure out which biggest name is apparently missing. – Presuming this is MSI, therefore, why have they officially withdrawn from manufacturing their own custom Intel Arc graphics cards? Well, the reasons are varied, but it seemingly boils down to the following key points:

• Quality concerns have been cited from what appears to be evaluations of Intel reference boards/PCBs – A factor that may, however, also include long-rumoured concerns over driver compatibility issues
• A general dissatisfaction over what has reportedly been a consistently shifting release schedule
• Concern that Intel has, even with AIB partners, still yet to confirm how much their Arc graphics cards are going to cost (it’s hard to know how much you can spend on a ‘custom’ design if you don’t know what the likely standard MSRP of the GPU will be)

On the whole, it’s hard to argue that either individually or as a whole, these are some entirely legitimate arguments to present. More worrying though, we have heard rumours over the last 6 months too that, pretty much, back up every single one of these claims!

I mean, presuming we are talking about MSI here, based on the above, can you really blame them for preferring, for Intel Arc at least, to give this one a pass?… – With their release so close to finally becoming a reality though, this is clearly something to give Intel a bit of an added headache about!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!