Intel ARC A750 review (Page 30)

Intel ARC A750 review

Graphics cards 1049 Page 30 of 30 Published 2022-11-11 13:16 by Hilbert Hagedoorn

Final words and conclusion

Final words

In many ways, the A750 shows performance pretty close to that of the A770. Of course, you'll drop 8 GB in graphics memory and are down a notch in performance. But would this card have remained 290 available in its target price bracket it could have offered pretty darn food value for money. Unfortunately, it is either unavailable or prices have inflated to levels where it doesn't make much sense. Even though it was a bummer that we couldn't share this review right away at the actual embargo date. This delay also brought about a few new things. Stability is the first. We have had some small stability problems, but nothing major. Second, we're just a few driver builds away from the first round of reviews, and it looks like Intel has been working hard to improve the performance of games and especially artificially made titles. We can see that DX12 games have a lot of potential. If we only look at artificial benchmarks, Intel does very well. Unfortunately, it's winning where it does not count and losing where it does. In games, the performance is roughly below the RTX 3060. So it's hard to figure out what to think. However, we have to give Intel credit because this is their first mainstream product series. Both the card and the architecture seem to be sound, the software, however, is decent at best.

Performance

Ultimately the two priority tickets to look at are price and performance. Pricing wise Intel injected the card that we tested at 290 USD. That's a fair price considering the competition end even competitive. Unfortunately, you can't purchase it for that money if you can even find one. Realistically here in the EU, prices no, however, are anywhere from 350 to 400 EUR. Comparing a couple of games at 2560x1440, yes WQHD, with the intended competing cards, it's fairly okay. All cards remain in that same realm of performance. One side note; if you've been looking at frame times from a few pages ago, a few titles need some work. Overall at 1080p, the performance is mostly good, even at 1440p, it's pretty close to the competition. There will be times when it's way off, which pretty much rules this card out for anyone with an older system that doesn't support Resize BAR, but I think I can say the same thing about this card as I did in my review of the Arc A770: if I bought a cheap prebuilt PC with an Arc A750 in it, I'd be fine with that. And for a GPU from the first generation, that's a lot of praise.

Have we seen bugs?

Yes, let me quickly sum them up, and they are similar to the 770 review.

Unigine Superposition shows above-normal performance
Fora Horizon shows graphics anomalies
3DMark Raytracing test crashed once
Far Cry 6 at Full HD showed an abnormal performance drop and lower FPS
Far Cry 6 at WQHD showed an abnormal frametime plot
GPU at IDLE draw 40 Watts.

Other than that, we've not seen massive disturbances in the force. These are all things that can and will get solved.

Cooling & noise levels

The cooling design is terrific and can easily be compared with the levels an RTX 3000 or RX 6000 card offers. Under heavy load conditions, expect the card to close in at a 70c marker; that value can increase depending on the airflow inside your chassis. Acoustics-wise, you're looking at perhaps <38 DBa, meaning it's silent enough but sometimes can be heard. FLIR imaging shows nothing worrying. And also let me quickly complement how the card looks with the slim design and subtly backlit RGB. It looks nice.

Energy

We touched the topic a bit; the power draw under intensive gaming for ARC A770 is okay. We measured it to be close to the 180 Watt range. This is the tradeoff for a bit more bite in performance for this graphics card model in particular. At a driver level, you can enable some more TGP performance towards 225 Watts though that didn't bring us much extra performance. We do see some power spikes, but at 225~250 Watt any PSU can deal with that. There currently is an IDLE bug, the card draws 40 Watts at all times. You can manually fix that, read here

Pricing

As stated, the 290 USD price tag for the 8GB A570 seems fair for a mainstream card, but considering the competition prices, not bad at all. Unfortunately, things have gone sour here, as we see the card listed at prices from 350 to 400 EURO here in the EU. And that kind of money for this product with the early-stage jitters is just a notch too much.

Tweaking

Intel did its best to inject some tweaking options. Currently, we do not have Afterburner ready and I do not expect this anytime soon either, as communication with Intel on this topic remains challenging. The ARC Control tools can increase the power limiter to 225W, you n increase voltage and get an offset available for clock frequency. All in all, we squeezed 3~4% additional performance out of the card.

Conclusion

As gamers, we must wonder if we would purchase this card for our own usage. And that's a far more complicated question than we realized. Using a graphics card not powered by an AMD or NVIDIA graphics chip seemed fiction. But here we are. Honestly, we're not at all disappointed as to what intel brought to the table here. Remember, this really is the first-ever mainstream graphics card from Intel, it could have been much worse. Most people who want to play the Intel Arc game will buy this one. But it still has some problems, just like the A770; these are the early release jitters. Even though there are some oddities, the performance of the A750 is close enough to that of the A770 to make it worth buying, especially since this version costs $60 less than the A770 Limited Edition, we'd even call that good value in the year 2022. The biggest difference between the A750 and the A770 is that the A770 has twice as much VRAM as the A750. However, considering a Full and QHD domain, that is enough graphics memory. The A750 is promised to be a mid-range card on par with the RTX 3060, which Intel has delivered mostly. If you don't mind a few bugs and are willing to give Intel time to fix its drivers, then can even enjoy the A750. It's also a better buy overall than an 8GB A770; the better product of the first round of Intel cards is the 16GB A770. The biggest concern is availability; there hardly is any, driving prices up out of a comfortable realm. But in the end, we're most certainly not disappointed by the first-generation ARC Series 700 products.