So, any other graphics card buyers out there dealing with some whiplash right about now?
Yeah, if you’ve been following the GPU market even somewhat closely over the last few years,
I wouldn’t blame you. We went from not being able to find any cards
in stock (at least not any that weren’t scalped into oblivion),
to right now where we’re so spoilt for choice (at least when it comes to older cards) it
feels like you’d almost have to pay someone to take your old GTX 1080 off your hands!
But as bad as the GPU market is becoming for companies and people selling cards
(especially terrible cards like a certain 4060), this flip-flop of availability and
pricing is an absolute godsend for anyone looking to buy a GPU in 2023.
Even more so now that we have a brand new, legitimately exciting third option to consider.
Intel’s ARC cards have been shaking things up in a non-insignificant way for a while now,
and for good reason. And in this video, I’ll be taking my first-ever look at what
the bluer grass on the other side has to offer in the form of the Intel ARC A750,
one of the most exciting cards I’ve played around with in a loooong time.
Almost as exciting as the sponsor for this video: Me. That’s right,
no sponsors for this one, but if by the end of this video you want to grab an A750 of your own,
or any of the other parts featured in this video, do it via my Amazon affiliate links down below.
You get cool new gear and support the channel and the work I do here while you’re at it. Win win!
Alright, so I don’t usually get too deep into the specs for all of the parts I review on this
channel, but considering just how important Intel’s entry into the GPU Battle Royale is,
I’m definitely making an exception here.
Intel’s Arc A-series desktop lineup currently includes the more entry-level A310 and A380 cards,
the top of the range A770 in both 8 and 16GB flavors (though if you want the 16GB limited
edition you’ll have to act fast since Intel won’t be making any more of that particular
version), and then finally, right in the sweetspot, we have our A750 right here.
The A750 is a pretty beefy GPU, packing 21.7 million
transistors into a relatively huge die measuring in at 406 square millimeters.
For reference, one of the A750’s biggest rivals, Nvidia’s RTX 3060,
only features 12 million transistors packed into a much smaller 276 square millimeter die.
The A750 is also big on other more interesting numbers, including 3584 shading units,
448 Tensor cores to boost machine learning tasks, 28 dedicated RT cores, and a base clock speed of
2050 MHz that boosts all the way up to 2400 MHz. The card also features a very capable
memory configuration, sporting 8 gigs of GDDR6 with a 256 bit bus and a bandwidth of 512 GB/s.
Unfortunately, the card is also pretty big on power draw,
requiring both an 8 and 6-pin power connector for a TDP of 225W.
But the most interesting number of all is 240, as in $240,
since that’s the price the A750 can currently be had for. At that price the A750 comes
in at around $20 cheaper than its direct competition from team green, the RTX 3060,
and thanks to price cuts from AMD, puts it just around $15 cheaper than the RX 6600 XT.
For that price, along with what should be dang decent mid-range gaming performance,
the A750 (along with the other ARC cards) also ship with some other legitimately useful
features. The most important of which, to me anyway, is support for XeSS Super Sampling,
Intel’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR, and the Xe Media Engine which leverages AI to
accelerate content creation, and includes support for the AV1 codec
(which if you’re a streamer or content creator, you know that’s a pretty big deal).
But let’s not get too stuck in the weeds just yet, because first I want to give Intel some major
props for the design of this thing. Intel’s own, Limited Edition version of the A750 is nothing
short of a masterclass in GPU building, especially considering that it’s a first generation product.
This thing looks and feels phenomenal. Even though the majority of the card’s shroud is plastic,
it really doesn’t feel like it. The card has a reassuring weight to it, landing at just over
a kilogram, and it feels absolutely solid, even more so than many, much more expensive cards from
the likes of MSI, ASUS, and the other AIB cards I’ve worked with over the last couple of years.
And man, does this thing ever look sleek. The matte black finish on the face of the card,
along with feeling soft to the touch, looks incredibly clean – though it is a bit of
a fingerprint magnet – and the blackout fans sell the whole aesthetic even more.
Add to that a sturdy, black, metal support bracket running through the middle of the
card finished off with minimalistic Intel ARC branding, a silver, mirrored strip framing the
face of the card and adding some contrast to the mix, and a clean backplate with a pinstripe
design and even more stylish branding and you’ve got yourself a heck of a premium-looking card.
So premium that I don’t even mind that the Intel ARC branding on the side of the card isn’t RGB.
As much as I love RGB, sticking to a clean, white LED just feels kind of…
appropriate for this card, and I think it looks fantastic. Though, not gonna lie,
the RGB lighting of the A770 Limited Edition card does catch my eye just a teensy bit more…
But hey, looks are subjective. So let’s move on to something we can all agree on: performance.
The system I used for testing all of the cards was equipped with AMD’s Ryzen 9 7900X,
slotted into MSI’s Pro X670-P motherboard, 32 gigs of Geil’s
EVO V memory running at 6000 MHz with CL 32 timings, Crucial’s P5 Plus as the main drive,
and all of it powered by Antec’s Signature 1000W power supply.
And first up are two synthetic benchmarks in the form of Unigine’s Superposition and 3DMark’s
Time Spy. In both cases the A750 made absolute mincemeat of the 1660 Ti and the aging GTX 1080,
while somehow managing to come not too far off of striking distance from the RTX 3070.
Impressive stuff.
Moving on to real games focussing first on 1080p, Intel’s A750 continues to dominate
the two older cards. Of course the 3070 still takes top honors in all of the games
tested (as well it should given it’s hundreds of dollars more expensive),
but after removing it from the equation, the A750 comes out ahead of the other two
cards in nine of the 13 games tested, and in many of those cases by a friggin’ landslide.
In games like Far Cry 6, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Hitman 3, and the Resident Evil 4 Remake,
the A750 came out on top by more than 29% and by as much as 38%, while in the other games
where it won, it still won by decent margins. The A750 does lose out to the older cards in a
few of the games tested, but in most of those cases it wasn’t anything to write home about.
I say most because there are two notable exceptions. Firstly, no matter what I tried,
I couldn’t get Borderlands 3 to run on the A750 at all, and in Valorant, the Intel card
severely underperformed compared to all thee of the other cards. I’m not entirely sure why
the card had trouble with these two titles, but thankfully they definitely seem to be exceptions.
With all the numbers minus Valorant and Borderlands tallied up, the A750 managed
to beat the 1660 Ti by 28%, and pushed ahead of the GTX 1080 by a very respectable 16% at 1080p.
Moving on to 1440p, the A750 somehow manages to impress even more, this time taking the
dub in 11 of the 13 games tested and by even larger margins than at 1080p in some cases.
Even more impressive is that the card managed to stick well above 60 FPS in all of the titles
tested minus God of War where it just barely missed the mark, which at these higher settings
is no small feat. Averaging out our scores, at 1440p, the A750 improves on its lead over the
1660 Ti this time coming in at 40% faster, and leaves the GTX 1080 in the dust by around 24%.
Clearly Intel has built quite the monster of a 1080p card here that can also excell
at 1440p as long as you don’t completely max out all of your in-game quality settings.
But that’s not the end of the story. Intel equipped this thing with tensor and RT cores,
so let’s take a quick look at what those are capable of.
Now the numbers for this round of testing aren’t all that comprehensive because I
wasn’t able to turn Ray Tracing on for the 1660 Ti or GTX 1080 in most of the games,
but the results are still very interesting nonetheless.
In 3DMark’s Ray-Tracing-focussed Port Royal benchmark, the A750 flexes those
RT core muscles landing a score just 21% lower than the much beefier RTX 3070,
and completely crushing the poor GTX 1080.
Then, in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Far Cry 6, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, F1 22,
and the Resident Evil 4 Remake it ran more than comfortably at 60 FPS and above. It obviously
couldn’t keep up with the RTX 3070’s RT horsepower in most of those cases, but the fact that the
games were that playable with RT settings this high on first-gen hardware is still kind of crazy.
The only hiccup the A750 faced came in the form of Cyberpunk,
where the game was barely playable at 28 FPS. But that’s why we have super sampling tech,
where those tensor cores come in very handy. With Intel’s Xess turned on, the game ran at
a much more playable 52 FPS, an even bigger jump than the 3070 saw from turning on DLSS.
This really is one heck of a showing for Intel’s first real foray into the
dedicated GPU market. And the A750 Limited Edition card is kind of a beast too.
The card had no problem boosting to its max clock speed of 2400 MHz and
sticking there comfortably, while also staying well below it’s max TDP at 191W,
which meant the GPU only maxed out at around 68 degrees C.
In order to keep temps low, the card’s fans did ramp up to around 2500 RPM, which did make ita bit
loud under heavy load, but not noticeably more than any of the other cards tested.
Now, if it seems like I’m a fan of Intel’s A750,
it’s because I am. I wasn’t really sold on ARC when it first launched. I mean, I was very happy
to have more competition entering the market just like every other reviewer, but that was
mostly because said competition might force Nvidia and AMD to lower their prices. And on top of that,
ARC’s launch was pretty rough when it came to drivers and lacklustre performance in older games.
But now, many months later, Intel has proven that they’re committed to these cards,
and have delivered on most of their promises to increase
performance and stability in a lot of the games where the cards struggled.
And other than my version of Borderlands 3 which refused to work, and some less than stellar
performance in Valorant, I didn’t run into any bugs or weird issues during my time
with the card. Everything was seamless just like any other card from the two big boys.
Heck, I didn’t even have any issues with Intel’s Graphics Command Center software,
other than maybe the extremely annoying pop-up notifications. But then again, I only used it
to install drivers and set fan speed, so I didn’t really dig all that deep into it.
Overall, I think what Intel has done here with the A750 is extremely impressive,
and thankfully not just in an “impressive for a first gen GPU”
or “impressive enough to make Nvidia and AMD lower prices” kind of way.
The card presents a very decent value for the performance you’re getting,
whether you’re gaming at 1080p, 1440p, or even if you want to play around with some
ray tracing settings. And on top of that, I think Intel has improved the drivers
enough for me to actually feel comfortable recommending it to anyone, rather than just
enthusiasts who like to tinker with stuff and know how to fix issues when they pop up.
That’s right AMD and Nvidia, Intel is here, and man do I hope they’re here to stay.
Unlike me, who can’t stay because this video is done. Thanks to everyone for watching,
and while you’re down there in the description getting subscribed and hitting the like button,
be sure to use my Amazon affiliate links to
buy any of the parts mentioned in the video to support the channel.
And yeah, catch you all in the next one. Cheers.