Sparkle Intel Arc A770 ROC Luna OC Edition, 16GB GDDR6, 2X DBB 100mm Fan, 2.5-Slot, Metal Backplate, Luna White Edition, SA770RW-16GOC

I really wanted the Battlemage B580 from Intel, rather than either AMD or Nvidia for a graphics card, and for video editing, it needed to be ideally an X16 graphics card and with at least 10GB of memory, or more, but the card was elusive as it was bought out by scalpers and resold on eBay. In early January, I found a listing here on Amazon for the Sparkle branded A770, the previous gen Intel card, also known as Alchemist.It's I believe to be a true 4K card with 16GB of memory and has had several driver updates since introduction 2 years or so ago and some of its early teething issues have since then become abated.It went into a 15th gen based Core 7 Ultra build, which also included a fresh, new chipset and socket and my choice was potential future proofing for at least a couple of generations, though that's no guarantee.Anyway, I run at the moment, a year old 1080P 22" monitor from Onn (a Walmart brand) and a Dell 27" 4K monitor. The Onn monitor is connected to Display Port via DP to HDMI dongle at the card due to it having a display port, and is 1080P, the Dell can do Display Port, but via the USB C connector at the monitor and full size DP port on the card and there is only 1 HDMI port.Sadly, the dongle does not pass anything higher than 1080P, so the Onn got that, and the Dell runs full HDMI for 4K.After all updates, including Intel graphics card drivers, Gigabyte BIOS updates etc, the card runs great and I think the image is a bit sharper on both monitors. Previous card was an older GT1030 from Nvidia that goes with the previous small form factor Dell that this current PC I built replaces.Setting it up for 2 monitors took a few minutes but I was able to get it set up, and have the mouse move between them.Preliminary trial of Davinci Resolve 19 (most recent version) on a 1080P timeline not optimized yet showed mostly all smooth scrubbing of H.264 footage. Not bad at all.Really like this card and just FYI, like most cards of recent generations, 3 Display Ports and one HDMI port, while they technically can do upwards of 8K with the latest iterations of both the Display Port specs and HDMI specs, the card itself, depending on the model you have may not be capable of doing 4K without struggling for anything but playback of video, let alone many games and not produce higher frame rates.Likely not anything as powerful as a 4090 or 5090, but it is not a 2000 dollar card for the 5090, but instead, sells for under 350 US.While it is not the latest iteration of XeSS 2, it has many of the current Battlemage specs via software/driver updates for Battlemage as well. So far it's stable and works smoothly.Glad I went ahead with getting this card as the B580 has been hard to find.

If you don't care about gaming - and this card is not for gamers - then this card has one big advantage: transcoding. Need something cheap, low power draw, doesn't need PCI-E connector, and can transcode like mad for homelab? This is the right card for that purpose.Do NOT buy this card expecting to game. Period. It won't do it. Buy it for fast transcoding. Note: you have to have rebar support or this card will lose significant performance. So if you don't have rebar support in an older BIOS, pass. If you plan to use this card in a passthrough for something like ProxMox or XCP, etc. you'll lose rebar and performance gets cut basically in half. It's still quite good, but it never gets the performance you wish it would be.

I upgraded from an AMD Radeon RX570 4gb to this Sparkle Orc ARC A750 because it was time. The RX570 was getting a little long in the tooth. I used DDU to uninstall the AMD display drivers and shut the computer down. After removing the old GPU, I installed the A750 and was pleasantly surprised on how much more room I had (the A750 is smaller than the RX570). The A750 looked great after installation. One thing I made sure to do was use separate VGA cables for the two 8 pin power connectors the A750 needs instead of using just one like I did on the AMD card. Intel claims you need a power supply with a minimum of 650 watts, however, all PSU power calculators online that I tried said 500 is sufficient. This is good because my power supply is only rated at 600 watts so I may need to upgrade that in the coming future.Driver install went without a hitch. I like the Intel control center and its layout. It’s easy to read and navigate. Of course I had to check out the performance configuration page and check out the over clocking, even though I don’t over clock.I don’t game much, maybe three games is all I ever play. I fired up WoW and on max settings at 1440p I got 125 FPS. Yes, I know, WoW can play on a potato, but it was still interesting to see the performance difference compared to my RX570 which could only achieve 45 FPS on the same settings.The next game I tried was EverQuest 2, and yes once again this game can play on a potato. At max settings 1440p I got 138 FPS. The AMD card could only get 55.The last game I tried was Eve Online. I got 80 FPS on 1080p at medium settings with my RX570. With the A750 I got 123 FPS at 1440p maxed out settings and FSR set to max qualityI should mention that the A750 never got above 65 degrees Celsius while gaming, and that’s with automatic fan curve enabled.The only real con I could find was at idle in Windows 11 desktop, the card consumed 45 watts. This seemed a bit excessive to me, but hey what do I know?I also wanted to mention that the Sparkle logo lights up and changes color depending on the CPU temperature. When in windows or watching videos the logo lit up blue. While playing games, it lit up yellow. I assume the next colors are orange and red if the CPU gets hotter, but I haven’t seen those yet.I know Intel has come a long way with driver optimization and still has more work to do with some games out there. As for now, everything is working just fine for me.The price to performance ratio simply cannot be beat. Nvidia and AMD should take note. You shouldn’t need to refinance your house just to purchase a great video card for your rig.In conclusion, if you’ve been on the fence about joining team blue, now’s the time. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised, I know I was. My rig specs are below.AMD Ryzen 5 5600xAsus ROG Strix B550 F WiFi II32gb G.Skill Trident Z 3600mhz RGB1TB Klevv m.2 nvme gen 4Sparkle Orc Intel ARC A750 OC