Intel Arc A770 And A750 Limited Edition Review: Putting Alchemist To The Test

We also spent some time overclocking the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition. Intel actually includes overclocking tools inside the Arc Control panel, with one caveat – they only support GPU overclocking. At this time, Intel doesn’t offer memory overclocking for its Arc GPU, but that’s something that may come along in a future update.

Overclocking The Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition

Accessing the overclocking tools in Intel’s drivers is simply matter of bringing up Arc Control with the ALT-I hotkey combo, hitting the performance menu, and clicking configure in the Performance Tuning section, just below all of the real-time hardware health and performance monitoring data. Also note that all of the performance monitoring data shown in the menu can be overlaid on-screen at any time by hitting ALT-O.

The Performance Tuning section must first be enabled before overclocking the GPU (note the ‘On’ switch at the very top). Once enabled, users have control over four options, GPU Performance Boost, Voltage Offset, Power Limit and GPU Temperature Limit. The GPU Performance Boost option is essentially a frequency offset, and the Voltage Offset and other limits are self-explanatory.


By default, the power limit is set to 190 Watts on the Arc A770 LE and temperature limit is set to 90°C. In the real world, with adequate case cooling, we doubt the A770 LE will ever come close to its temperature limit. Even while overclocking, our sample never got warmer than the low-70s, after hours of benchmarking and testing. Upping the power limit will, however, enable the card to boost to higher frequencies and increase performance.

We immediately maxed out the power limit to 220W and set GPU Performance Boost to 50 (the mid-point in the slider), but were met with instability and lock-ups, unfortunately. We ultimately ended up settling on a 215 Watt power limit, with GPU Performance Boost set to 25, with a slight bump (.15mV) to the GPU voltage. At these settings, our particular sample was perfectly stable and the GPU frequency hovered just below 2.6GHz most of the time, with a GPU temp of around 74°C. With further experimenting, we’re fairly certain higher clocks will be possible.


While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw performance improvements of about 5 – 7%. In 3DMark Time Spy, the Arc A770 Limited Edition extended its lead over the other cards, and in FarCry 6 it nearly caught the Radeon RX 6600 XT.

Total System And Power Consumption With Intel Arc On Board

Intel Arc Alchemist A7-Series Review Summary And Verdict

The Intel Arc A750 and A770 Limited Edition are late to market and Intel missed its initial performance targets with the cards, but make no mistake – this launch is a monumental occasion and a potential disruptor for the gaming GPU market.

Although our first-hand experience with the Intel Arc A750 and A770 Limited Edition cards has been relatively short up to this point, we have a good sense of what they’re all about and what makes them tick. In terms of their build quality and the out-of-box experience, Intel clearly got many things right. We think Intel Arc A750 and A770 Limited Edition cards look great and they have a premium feel. The fit and finish really is very good here. Regarding performance, there weren’t too many surprises, given how much data Intel had disclosed over the last few months. The cards struggled in the DX11 tests relative to the competition, but with DX12 titles and with ray tracing enabled, the Intel Arc A750 and A770 Limited Edition competed favorably with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 and AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT.

We were particularly pleased with how well Intel seems to have implemented XeSS this early in the game. XeSS “just worked” on all of the cards we tested, though it clearly stood out on Arc when using its on-board XMX engines. Image quality was good and XeSS offered significant performance increases across the board.

There are some chinks in the armor with Arc Alchemist, however. Intel clearly has some work to do to optimize the overall experience. The latest Arc Control panel we used for testing had an annoying issue that threw a Windows UAC dialog on every restart. We were also greeted with the same alerts every time we opened Arc Control, despite dismissing them numerous times, and the entire Arc Control panel is an overlay, so you can’t reposition it on-screen. We also experienced some quirks in SPECviewperf, and performance in general took a much bigger hit when the 8GB frame buffer on the A750 was exceeded versus the Radeon. Taken altogether, it’s clear Intel still has lots of work to do on the software and optimization front. To be fair, Intel has said this all along, but we point it out these specifics so potential early adopters are aware of what the initial experience might bring.
All of that said, we’re psyched this day has arrived. Intel’s entrance into this space means increased competition for the incumbents, and with increased competition, good things for consumers usually follow. At Intel’s current pricing ($289 for A750 LE, and $349 for A770 LE), these new graphics cards will be putting pressure on NVIDIA and AMD, though pricing on mainstream GeForces and Radeons has plummeted recently as well. What initially seemed liked highly aggressive pricing on Intel’s part a few weeks back, isn’t quite as aggressive today, but we suspect this is an equation that will be in flux for weeks, as supply of cards continues to increase and both NVIDIA and AMD introduce new next-gen products.

In the end, although late and not quite as performant as we initially hoped, it is great that Intel's Arc A750 And A770 are here. We hope that everyone involved at Intel that made this day a reality, can breathe a sigh of relief and redouble there efforts to further refine and optimize these first-generation cards, while simultaneously barreling forward with next-generation offerings.