ASRock Sneaks A 16GB Arc A770 Phantom Gaming Graphics Card Into Its GPU Lineup
It's getting increasingly difficult to find an Intel Arc A770 graphics card that's both in stock and being sold from a first-party seller. That's a shame because the Arc A770 is a cost-effective solution for 1080p and 1440p gaming (and it's gotten better with time thanks to continued driver optimizations). ASRock apparently agrees because it quietly added a 16GB model to its arsenal.
The new Arc A770 Phantom Gaming 16GB OC (A770 PG 16GO) ranks as ASRock's fifth Arc series graphics card—it joins the Arc A770 Phantom Gaming D 8GB OC (A770 PGD 8GO), Arc A750 Challenger D 8GB OC (A750 CLD 8GO), Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC (A380 CLI 6GO), and Arc A380 Low Profile 6GB (A380 LP 6G).
Twitter user @SquashBionic spotted the new addition on Newegg, which so far is the only retailer to show ASRock's latest SKU. It's not in stock at the moment, but as far as pricing goes, it's listed for $329.99.
That's $20 more than the list price for the 8GB model, though it's on sale for $299.99 and there's a $20 off coupon code available too (VGAEXCAA783). So it's effectively a $50 street price difference between the 16GB and 8GB Arc A770 Phantom Gaming models.
In addition to having 16GB of GDDR6 memory like Intel's own Limited Edition (LE) model, the Arc A770 Phantom Gaming 16GB OC brings a mild overclock to the party with a 2.2GHz GPU clock speed. That's 100MHz higher than what Intel's reference specs call for. Otherwise, ASRock's custom model uses the same speed 17.5Gbps memory chips tied to a 256-bit bus, which delivers 560GB/s of memory bandwidth.
ASRock's Phantom Gaming design also utilizes the same beefed up cooling solution as its 8GB variant. It consists of two large, aluminum finned heatsinks connected by "ultra-fit" heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU. ASRock touts nano thermal paste on the GPU and premium thermal pads on the memory chips. Externally, you're looking at three cooling fans and RGB lighting.
You can check out our Arc A770 and A750 review to see how Intel's top two discrete GPUs perform. They arrived at a time when the GPU market was in a bit of turmoil with low stock and high street prices. The Arc lineup is arguably not quite as attractive these days now that the GPU shortage is largely over, and with both AMD and NVIDIA having added lower priced SKUs to each one's current generation lineups. But they're still serviceable options.
Pricing on the ASRock A770 Phantom Gaming 16GB looks decent overall. A couple of other Arc models in the wild include the Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 16GB for $378.08 on Amazon (5% off) and Intel Arc A750 LE (8GB) for $219.99 at Amazon (8% off).
