Everyone likes fast graphics cards, but we would rather not have to spend a fortune for them. And while less powerful GPUs don't need big triple-fan coolers, the market for compact graphics cards has received little attention.

With this untapped market in mind, Asrock has introduced the Intel Arc A380 Low Profile 6GB card. Under the hood is a typical A380 with an ACM-G11 GPU, 1,024 stream processors running at 2.0 GHz, and 6GB of GDDR6 memory. While not as powerful a card as one might expect in this market, it does have some important features and one curious feature.

The card is a low-profile card, meaning that the total board power is 75W, meaning that it does not require an external power supply and instead draws all its power from the PCIe slot. While we appreciate a high-performance low-profile card, we feel that Asrock missed a trick by requiring dual slots.

Asrock will say that a dual-slot cooler is necessary because of the 75W TDP, and I understand that point of view, but I have tested several low-profile cards over the years, most recently the Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6400 was tested; it has a low TDP of 53W, but with a single-fan cooler, doubling its area is not impossible.

Having a dual-slot cooler is not a deal-breaker, but without access to cooling data, it seems like overkill.

Think of an old crappy off-the-shelf office machine that could be repurposed; a 10-year-old compact clunker Dell or HP could be revived with a SATA SSD and a card like the A380. No need to replace the power supply, it's basically plug-and-play. As long as the system isn't completely bogged down by a garbage 10 year old Celeron with 2 cores and 2 threads, it could work.

The Arc A380 has an important feature that makes it usable in older systems, and that is its PCIe 4.0 x8 interface. The RX 6400, which has similar performance, runs on a pathetic x4, which is a bottleneck for PCIe 3.0 x4, let alone PCIe 2.0. This alone makes the A380 a good choice for older systems.

Modern, graphics-intensive games will struggle to run at 1080p on the A380 without compromising image quality. But what if you want to play a few less demanding but popular games, such as Fortnite or Overwatch?

Asrock has not yet revealed pricing for the Arc A380 Low Profile, but given that the Asrock Arc A380 Challenger costs $120, it is safe to assume that the Low Profile model will be the same price.

The A380 is more than just a gaming card. It is also suitable for living room PCs, media servers, or even for upgrading office PCs with depleted graphics. However, we wish it had been a single-slot card.