Intel announced its first Iris Xe discrete desktop graphics cards yesterday but revealed the unfortunate news that they would only be available as part of a pre-built system. Those of you who are considering getting one to pull apart in order to see what ASUS and Colorful’s DG1 variants can do on a test system may want to rethink that, as Intel has confirmed that the GPUs will only work with select combinations of Intel Core processors and motherboards. That’s because they require a special BIOS that supports Iris Xe.
“The Iris Xe discrete add-in card will be paired with 9th gen (Coffee Lake-S) and 10th gen (Comet Lake-S) Intel Core desktop processors and Intel(R) B460, H410, B365, and H310C chipset-based motherboards and sold as part of pre-built systems,” Intel said in a statement sent to Legit Reviews. “These motherboards require a special BIOS that supports Intel Iris Xe, so the cards won’t be compatible with other systems.”
What this means is that Intel’s first Iris Xe discrete desktop GPUs are relegated to the company’s lower-ended chipsets and can’t be paired with the more popular and premium Z490 platform. It also means that the GPUs have zero compatibility with any kind of AMD system, which some critics claim isn’t all that surprising.
“The new cards offer a compelling upgrade to existing options in the market segment,” Intel wrote in yesterday’s press release. “They feature three display outputs; hardware video decode and encode acceleration, including AV1 decode support; Adaptive Sync; Display HDR support and artificial intelligence capabilities thanks to DP4a deep-learning inference acceleration. The Iris Xe discrete graphics cards come with 80 execution units and 4 gigabytes of video memory.”