Hardware setup | Power consumption
Hardware Installation
There are no complicated steps involved in installing any Intel ARC graphics cards. Once the card has been installed in the computer, connect the display and any external power connectors, such as the 6- or 8-pin or the new 12-pin PEG power connectors. Ideally, it would be best if you chose a power supply with these PCIe PEG connectors as a standard feature. Purchase a high-quality power supply, calculate or estimate your peak power usage for the entire PC, and then multiply that figure by two to account for the fact that your power supply is most efficient at half the maximum load. For example, if you use 300W Watts on average for the entire PC while gaming, we'd recommend a 600 Watt power supply as a general rule of thumb.
Once this is completed, we will boot into Windows and install the most recent drivers, after which everything should be operational. There is no additional configuration necessary or required unless you wish to make changes to the settings, in which case you should enter the ARC control panel.
Power Consumption
We have moved to a power interposer for power consumption testing. This hardware and software combination is an exact hardware setup that will measure at the 12V rails and the PCIe slot. This isolates power consumption from other factors if you'd say measure at the socket outlet. The new measurements also allow us to provide more precise data, IDLE power consumption. But we'll also start displaying the average/typical power consumption and, as always, peak power consumption based on a gaming load. Why a power interposer? Well, GPUs normally reports both chip and board power via API, there are also reports what appears to be a value in-between chip-only and full board power, as verified by third-party interposer testing methodologies including PCAT and others. You can’t rely on API-reporting software such as GPU-Z or HWiNFO64 for accurate chip or board measurements to compare with. Our setup polls every 100ms allow us to objectively measure peak and typical energy consumption.
As you can see IDLE power consumption is way too high, Intel already acknowledged an issue with the high energy consumption of the graphics card while the system is idle. The problem is relatively easy to fix. Configuration is required to enable an idle low power consumption profile for Intel Arc Graphics Desktop cards until this is fixed at driver level.
Here is our power supply recommendation:
- Intel ARC A750 - On your average system, we recommend a 500 Watt power supply unit.
- Intel ARC A770 - On your average system, we recommend a 550 Watt power supply unit.
If you are going to overclock your GPU or processor, we recommend you purchase something with some more stamina. There are many good PSUs out there; please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have a lot of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there.
There's quite a bit going on here. Power delivery shows transient power spikes. Luckily at this Wattage, it's not an issue.
When measuring transient power spikes, these look much better than last-generation Ampere. Spikes and transients are fast-moving, high-energy bursts lasting for just a few milliseconds and superimposed onto the standard mains power supply. Let's move to the next page, where we'll look into GPU heat levels and noise levels coming from this graphics card.
