Intel ARC A750 review

ZAH Computers Tech Editorial

ZAH Computers Hardware Research Desk

Intel has presented their ARC A750 and A770 models for evaluation. This article will focus on the A750. The latest graphics card from Intel is aimed at the mainstream market, competing with the Radeon RX 6600 and GeForce RTX 3060. With 8GB of graphics memory, the A750 is situated in a more favorable price bracket, and it does provide reasonable value for money, assuming that the retail prices are not excessively elevated. Intel has faced significant challenges during its product launch. Initially, the company introduced only the slower A380 SKUs in the Asian market, and upon the release of the ARC A770, it encountered issues with low availability. Additionally, numerous software problems have affected the hardware releases. A contributing factor to the delayed reviews is the insufficient number of sample kits provided by Intel. As a result, content creators on platforms like YouTube were prioritized over more technical media outlets, although there were some exceptions. On a positive note, since the launch, Intel has made notable improvements to its drivers. Our assessment indicates that the ARC A700 series provides a relatively stable platform, demonstrating strong performance in DX12 games, while performance in DX11 games remains less impressive. It may have come to your attention that the A770 was introduced in two distinct configurations: one with 8GB of memory and another with 16GB. The A770 Limited Edition currently under evaluation, whereas the standard 8GB model is available. Additionally, there is the A750, which features a slightly reduced specification. It is important to note that these are the manufacturer's suggested retail prices, and we have been unable to locate these prices at any retail outlets. In the European Union, the cost is approximately 350 EUR. For a product positioned within this performance category, this price point is relatively high.

The Arc A750 is constructed using the same 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon as the A770 Limited Edition, which we reviewed last week. While the A770 employs all 32 Xe Cores distributed across 8 Render Slices, the A750 is designed by disabling one of those Render Slices, resulting in 7 Render Slices and a total of 28 Xe Cores. The memory configuration is set at 8 GB, utilizing the same 256-bit GDDR6 memory bus width, but operates at a reduced data rate of 16 Gbps (totaling 512 GB/s bandwidth), in contrast to the A770's 17.5 Gbps (560 GB/s bandwidth). Additionally, the A750 does not offer a 16 GB variant.

Customers of Intel will seek or may require a personal computer that is compatible with ReBAR.

It is important to recognize that these graphics cards rely heavily on the functionality of Resize BAR. Therefore, if you intend to install an Intel ARC card, your computer should ideally be no more than a few years old. Ensure that your motherboard's BIOS is updated to the latest version and that this feature is enabled. While the cards will still operate without it, you can expect a significant decline in performance. The Arc A770 and A750 require a CPU from Intel's 10th generation or AMD's Ryzen 3000 series or newer. The Arc Alchemist series benefits substantially from Resizable BAR, which is a feature found in processors from recent generations. Although these cards can function with older CPUs, their performance will be considerably diminished if ReBAR is disabled. We did not conduct a complete retest of our benchmark suite, as we observed performance variations of up to 25% in several games. For this review, we will focus on Intel reference cards, also known as Limited Edition, and we even had to remove the engineering sample labels for our analysis.