intel arc b580 (i think that's the latest one) isn't obnoxiously priced but you're going to have to face the fact that your PCIE is really very slow. But it should work.
if you want to save even more money get the older Arc Battlemage GPUs. I used one it was comparable with an RTX 3060; i returned it because the machine i was running it in had a bug that was fixed 2 days before i returned it but i didn't know that.
I was seriously considering getting a b580 or waiting until the b*70 came out with more memory, although at this point i doubt it will be very affordable considering VRAM prices going up as well. A friend is supposedly going to ship me a few GTX 1080ti cards so i can delay buying newer cards for a bit.
By older Arc, I presume you're referring to Alchemist and not Battlemage in this case.
One of my brothers has a PC I built for him, specced out with an Intel Core i5 13400f CPU and an Intel Arc A770 GPU, and it still works great for his needs in 2025.
Surely, Battlemage is more efficient and more compatible in some ways over Alchemist. But if you keep your expectations in check, it will do just fine in many scenarios. Just avoid any games using Unreal Engine 5.
yeah i had an A770; it should be ~$200-$250 now on ebay, lightly used. It's, in my opinion, worth about $200, if it's relatively unused. As i mentioned, it's ~= RTX 3060 at least for compute loads, and the 16GB is nice to have for that. But for a computer from the 4th gen i'd probably only get a A380 or A580; the A380 is $60-$120 on ebay.
Note that some tinkering may be required for modern cards on old systems.
- A UEFI DXE driver to enable Resizable BAR on systems which don't support it officially. This provides performance benefits and is even required for Intel Arc GPUs to function optimally.
if you want to save even more money get the older Arc Battlemage GPUs. I used one it was comparable with an RTX 3060; i returned it because the machine i was running it in had a bug that was fixed 2 days before i returned it but i didn't know that.
I was seriously considering getting a b580 or waiting until the b*70 came out with more memory, although at this point i doubt it will be very affordable considering VRAM prices going up as well. A friend is supposedly going to ship me a few GTX 1080ti cards so i can delay buying newer cards for a bit.