A new Intel graphics card has been spotted running two M.2 SSDs from the same PCB as the GPU. With the launch of the Intel Arc B580, the rise of partner cards is coming, and a card made by Chinese manufacturer MaxSun has been spotted with two M.2 SSD slots.
The Intel Arc B580 has carved out a niche for itself recently, offering a 12GB graphics card for $249, unlike any other GPU in this price range. It’s not the very best graphics card in terms of frame rates, but it offers a lot for your money. Bang per buck isn’t the only benefit of this Intel GPU using the 8x PCIe 5.0 interface, though, as Maxsun has also shown another trick you can achieve on one of these cards.
A teardown of this curious card turned up on the Chinese social media site, BiliBili, and posted by “JustBuy” on X (formerly Twitter). Two SSDs are clearly visible sticking out from the graphics card PCB.
The SSDs piggyback off the GPU’s PCIe lanes. As the Intel Arc B580 only uses eight PCIe 5.0 lanes, MaxSun can give 16 lanes to the whole card if it uses a full connector. With another eight lanes still open, the card can then host a pair of 4x PCIe SSDs. The ability to squeeze so much hardware into one unit is potentially beneficial for the best mini gaming PC designs, as they can then house even more storage, enabling you to fit two of the best gaming SSD models without having to find space on the motherboard.
This won’t be the first time that SSDs have been tacked onto a GPU. In 2017, AMD fitted its Radeon Pro SSG with 2TB of storage, and Asus launched an Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti card with an M.2 slot on it last year. The latter card used the same concept of controlling an SSD with unused PCIe lanes.
There’s no release date for the MaxSun B580 as of yet, but the company has said that it’s working on it and will have more information soon.
The B580 is Intel’s first major win for gamers this year after a few disasters on the gaming CPU circuit. While its latest processors aren’t great for gamers right now, as we found in our recent Core Ultra 7 265K review, this new $249 graphics card appears to have sparked new life into the budget gaming market.
