Where’s Cannon Lake you may ask? Well according to Intel they don’t even acknowledge its existence anymore.

For those not in the know Cannon Lake was Intel’s way of showcasing what their 10nm process could actually accomplish, and in typical Intel fashion it sucked major ass. Piss poor yields could barely muster the ability to produce dual core die-shrink of Skylake and even so the integrated graphics portion of Cannon Lake were defective.

So Intel did what Intel does best, as to not come off as lying sacks of shit to their investors and to ensure that 10nm is “on track” for the umpteenth time they packaged and solid enough Cannon Lake units to count on ones hand and sent them all off to China as to say to their investors that it “reached the market’ while they themselves bury Cannon Lake never to speak of it again.

The same can kinda be said about Intel’s “first” attempt at a discrete graphics card as their entry into the Dedicated GPU market more rather their second “first” attempt after the whole Larrabee fiasco.

Intel’s DG1 serves as essentially plucking their “Gen 12” Iris Xe MAX integrated graphics from their latest crop of processors and giving it its very own circuit board, paired with just 4GB of LPDDR4X memory offering a pathetic 68 GB/s memory bandwidth, the DG1 is a pathetic excuse of a graphics card, often enough getting its ass handed to it by entry level products from competitors AMD and NVIDIA released well over six years ago.

Needless to say the DG1 isn’t even remotely competitive, the knock on effect similar to the launch of Cannon Lake has seen Intel’s DG1 “release” in the sense that there’s at least one unit out there….. perhaps somewhere in this vast world. Given that the DG1 module only works when paired with very few specific Intel processor and board combinations there has yet to be an official launch of the product in the sense of availability to purchase.

To this very day I still consider the DG1 nothing more than a prototype but perhaps I may be wrong about that….. though probably not.

Because that’s where CyberPowerPC comes into play, all of a sudden listed on BestBuy showcases one of their “Gamer Xtreme” pre-built machines. Nothing really noteworthy to mention really, it comes with a Intel Core i5-11400F processor paired with just 8GB of the cheapest DDR4 memory available along with a single 500GB NVMe SSD.

For $749.99 there’s not really much to complain about. It’s a budget system with budget garbage hardware inside however the real cause for concern is that it’s listed as offering a dedicated Intel Xe Graphics with 4GB of VRAM. This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering that the Intel Core i5-11400F does not come with its own integrated graphics which would mean that this “Gamer Xtreme” PC does indeed cme with the illusive DG1 discrete  graphics card.

It only took Intel an additional four months after the “official” launch of the Iris Xe “DG1” before it actually saw availability in OEM desktop machines, though considering the graphical horsepower that’s expected of the iGPU that could(nt) you’d be better off sticking to an ancient GTX 750 Ti or quite literally any entry level graphics card released within the past decade.