Maxsun Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo Graphics Card Hands On Impressions: Dual Battlemage GPUs With 48 GB Memory

Intel's Arc Pro GPU journey began with the first generation Alchemist A-series products, and last year, the company introduced its Battlemage B-Series products. The first generation of products was aimed at the budget segment, offering good perf/$, and while the positioning continues with the Battlemage lineup, it looks like Intel is slightly moving towards a higher-end segment with its Arc Pro B60, B65, and B70 series.

This move comes at a time when AI is the talk of the town, and local AI agents are becoming more and more popular. Also, Intel's recent workstation lineup, the Xeon 600 series, makes getting an all-Intel Pro and content creation system possible with new hardware upgrades.

Intel is working with various AIBs to roll out its latest Arc Pro B-Series graphics cards, and one of them is Maxsun, who have been giving the Battlemage series a unique custom treatment. Well, the same is true for Maxsun's Arc Pro B60 graphics card, which, instead of integrating one GPU, integrates two, with twice the memory.

Meet the Maxsun Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo, a high-end product with 48 GB VRAM and a dual-slot design, making it perfect for Battlematrix configurations (Scalable up to 4x GPUs).

Intel Arc Pro B60 - Full BMG-G21 GPU With 24 GB VRAM

The Intel Arc Pro B60 Graphics Card features the full Battlemage BMG-G21 GPU die with 20 2nd Gen Xe cores, 160 XMX engines, and a peak compute output of 197 TOPS (INT8). This solution scales from a TBP of 120W up to 200W and uses a Gen5 x8 PCIe link. The peak TOPS are around 15.5% lower than the Arc B580, which is a more gaming-tuned graphics card and uses a higher TBP (190W).

In terms of memory, the Intel Arc Pro B60 is equipped with 24 GB of VRAM across a 192-bit bus interface, which offers 456 GB/s of total bandwidth. These are the same 19 Gbps GDDR6 dies, but the capacity has been doubled over the Arc B580.

For performance, Intel is putting the Arc Pro B60 against the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB and the RTX 2000 Ada 16 GB. The Arc Pro B60 can be seen offering up to 2.7x performance in various AI models & it gets better once larger LLMs are tested, as the 16 GB VRAM is not enough to accommodate those.

Since the Maxsun Intel Arc Pro Dual 48G Turbo makes use of a dual-chip design, it carries 20 Xe2 cores per GPU clocked at 2400 MHz, 24 GB GDDR6 memory per GPU across a 192-bit x 2 interface, offering a total bandwidth of 456 GB/s per GPU, and running across a PCIe 5.0 x8 link per GPU. The card has a full TDP of 400W.

Enter Project Battlematrix, Dual Battlemage Cards For Massive LLMs & Up To 192 GB VRAM

But there's more: Intel isn't stopping itself from going big, and to address the memory-scaling problem with larger AI models, the company is introducing Project Battlematrix, an inference workstation platform that enables the use of up to 8 Intel Arc Pro AI GPUs at once.

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For this purpose, select Intel partners (such as Maxsun) will be offering an Intel Arc Pro B60 solution with dual GPUs. These are not connected via a PLX chip but act as a separate GPU, each with its own 24 GB of VRAM for a total of 48 GB of VRAM per card.

This enables a total of 8 BMG-G21 GPUs, 192 GB of VRAM, and 1280 XMX engines to power model sizes over 70 B. The platform is optimized around the use of PCIe Gen5 protocols on the Xeon ecosystem. Project Battlematrix will come with an LLM-optimized Linux software stack and feature full-stack validation, making it a potent solution for AI use cases that offer a lot of value to end users.

Maxsun Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo Unboxing & Closeup

Maxsun ships the Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo graphics card in a simple cardboard box with a large "B60" logo on the front and a company logo.

The backside of the box has a 3-year limited warranty label and some trademark logos.

Opening the box, you are greeted with a Thank You letter from Maxsun and QR codes to access the user support page.

The Arc Pro B60 Dual is packed within an anti-static wrap and has foam packaging around it to ensure that the card ships without any issues.

The only single accessory that the card ships with is a 16-pin adapter capable, which is rated at 450W and has three 8-pin connectors coming out of the other end.

Upon first look, the Maxsun Arc Pro B60 Dual is a really tall graphics card. It measures 300x110x40mm.

The front shroud is made out of plastic and reads "Touch The AI Future" on the front, which simply says that this card was made for AI.

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The back of the card features a nice metallic backplate with eight screws (four for each GPU) holding the coldplate, and another set of screws holding the shroud and heatsink.

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One side of the graphics card features the "Intel Arc Pro" logo and a Maxsun x Intel Arc sticker.

The other side is a simple matte black aesthetic.

The front of the card has a single 16-pin connector and two mounting holes for server mounts.

The back of the card features a large exhaust vent and four display outputs, which include two DP and two HDMI. Do note that each GPU has its dedicated output, so if you can run each GPU separately.

Coming back to the backside, the backplate covers the memory modules on the back.

As for the cooler, the Maxsun Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual Turbo features a blower-fan design and pushes large volumes of air through the central heatsink assembly and vents it out of the exhaust ports.

The Turbo design is a very tall card and has a very large blower fan, which provides lots of airflow.

Underneath the shroud are two nickel-plated copper baseplates with vapor chamber cooling. The first GPU on the left makes use of a large coldplate, while the one on the right has a smaller die baseplate. The cooler also features thermal pads for the VRAM modules and the VRMs. The fan is connected via a single 4-pin PWM header.

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The heatsink makes use of several aluminum fin arrays, which are equally spaced for good airflow.

Taking the card apart, you are greeted with two Battlemage BMG-G21 GPUs and 24 GB of VRAM per GPU for a total of 48 GB. The front side features 12 GDDR6 VRAM modules and two 6-phase VRM configs for each GPU.

The backside of the card features the rest of the 12 GDDR6 VRAM dies, so these are 2 GB dies. The backplate comes with thermal pads to keep these modules cool.

Maxsun Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo Content, Pro & AI Perf

First up, we have the standard 3DMark test suite, where we evaluate the graphics performance of the Intel Arc Pro B60 GPU. The benchmark was only able to detect a single GPU and offered performance slightly higher or comparable to the Arc B580.

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Next up, we have Geekbench 6's GPU benchmark, which evaluates the Vulkan and OpenCL performance. The results are as follows:

For rendering, we used the Blender benchmark, which tests the render performance of the GPU across three scenes:

Lastly, we have the V-Ray GPU score, in which the Arc Pro B60 Dual scored 1890 vpoints.

Next up, we have pro workloads tested in the SPECviewperf 15.1 bench suite. The results of the various workloads are seen below:

Moving over to AI benchmarks, we first have Geekbench AI, where the GPU performed well, and between a 5060 Ti / 5070.

Trying out UL Procyon, the AI benchmark results are as follows:

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We also wanted to try out Intel's own AI Playground suite, which offers a range of AI utilities to play around with, such as a localized AI agent, GenAI integrations, and more. Intel has done a fine job in bringing all the useful AI apps into one app, which is very responsive and fun to play around with. Using the Arc Pro B60, the text and GenAI responses were very fast.

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Lastly, we have LM Studio, where we tried out various large language models, or LLMs for short. The Arc Pro B60 Dual 48 GB is ideal for 40B parameters thanks to its large memory, & a single 24 GB instance can work well with 20B parameter LLMs.

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Getting the entire 48 GB VRAM of the Arc Pro B60 Dual run was hard at first. We tried with different CPU and motherboard configs, but in the end, it required a BIOS update, and the PCIe lanes had to be set to x8/x8 mode for the main slot so that both GPUs had full access. This enabled the full 48 GB VRAM buffer to show up in Windows, and we proceeded to compare the results of the single Arc Pro B60 24 GB with the dual 48 GB config. You can see below that as we use larger models, the 48 GB buffer provides better token generation speeds thanks to twice the memory, whereas certain 40B+ LLMs just failed to run on the 24 GB configuration.

It Can Game Too!

We also wanted to see if the Arc Pro B60 was able to handle games, especially using the Arc Pro drivers, and well, we were surprised that games weren't just able to run, but did so smoothly. The Arc Pro B60 48 GB presented a very playable experience, a little better than the Arc Pro B580.

We played Cyberpunk 2077 at High Settings with XeSS enabled and set to Balanced at both 1080p and 2160p. We also tested with both XeSS Frame-Gen disabled and enabled. The results are below:

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Conclusion

The Intel Arc Pro B60 presents itself as a very competitive graphics card for AI purposes. Its 24 GB model is already positioned competitively against its opponents, which feature lesser VRAM, and Maxsun has gone the extra mile by doubling not just the memory, but the GPUs too.

In our AI tests, the graphics card had no trouble working with 40B+ LLMs, which would be bottlenecked by lower VRAMs in the competition. Even the RTX 5090 features 32 GB or 16 GB lower VRAM than the Arc Pro B60 Dual, and the Intel Arc solution comes at half the price. With Intel's Arc Pro drivers, pro stuff such as rendering and content creation also worked like a breeze, but in GPU-intensive scenarios, the card is still rocking B580-tier GPUs, which are around an RTX 5060 level of performance, so the real usage of the card comes from its huge memory buffer.

NVIDIA's 48 GB VRAM models start at the RTX PRO 5000, which costs around $5000 US, and you can get yourself a custom RTX 4090 48 GB graphics card around a similar price point. So once again, the Arc Pro B60 Dual from Maxsun has its advantages.

What surprised me the most, besides the Pro and AI stuff, is that gaming performance makes this card very usable in AAA titles such as Cyberpunk 2077. It's a tad bit faster than the Arc Pro B580, and with 24 GB of usable VRAM from a single GPU, the game ran smoothly. The Arc Pro drivers and the AI Playground suite are a fantastic addition by Intel.

The dual-slot form factor makes the graphics card work well on workstations that can support up to four of these cards, for a highly scalable 192 GB VRAM AI solution. The card ran a bit hot with the memory running at 80C+ and the fan blowing really loud, but that's something to expect from a blower-type fan cooler.

Overall, the Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48 GB Turbo from Maxsun is a very well-priced graphics card with the ability to run large LLMs with ease, thanks to its massive 48 GB memory, and you can scale it up to 192 GB with four of these solutions running in parallel on your workstation setups.

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