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For our power, temperature, clock speed, and fan speed testing, we use Powenetics hardware and software. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus — at 1440p ultra with midrange and higher GPUs. We also test with the FurMark stress test at 1600x900. Our power testing PC uses an open testbed, as that's required for all the extra wires and riser card, and it's the same Core i9-9900K that we've used for the past several years.
As noted earlier, we had to install a second graphics card in the PC to get the Arc GPUs to POST, but we disabled the card in Device Manager and our equipment doesn't include the power use from the other PCIe slot. GPU-Z meanwhile monitors the fan speeds, clock speeds, and other aspects of the cards.
Despite having slower clocks and less memory, the Arc A750 only uses slightly less power than the A770 Limited Edition in Metro Exodus, and in FurMark, it actually used more power. That's probably due to binning, where the A770 gets the best chips from a wafer, while the chips used in the A750 may be harvested due to defects or other characteristics.
The A750 used 232W on average in FurMark and 210W in Metro Exodus. That might not seem like a big deal on its own, but look at Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti and 3070. Both easily surpass the Arc GPUs in performance, yet they also use the same amount of power in the case of the 3070, or less power in the case of the 3060 Ti. It's probably a case of Intel just not being quite as familiar with GPU tuning as Nvidia and AMD, at least for this first-generation dedicated GPU.
As noted in the A770 LE review, idle power draw on the Arc GPUs was also quite a bit higher than the competition. Where the RTX 3060 used 15W and the RX 6650 XT only needed 7.3W on average while idle, we measured power use of 45.1W on the A750 LE. Intel says it's aware of the issue and is working to address it, so hopefully a future driver update can curb the idle power use. Related to this, the fans on the Arc cards generally don't fully stop, or at least stay fully stopped, due to the higher idle power use.
Clock speeds for the A750 are well above the advertised 2050 MHz boost clock, with FurMark averaging over 2.3 GHz and Metro getting close to 2.4 GHz. It's also interesting that the A750 clocked higher than the A770 in Metro.
Binning of the chips also appears to be a factor in the temperatures and fan speeds we recorded. The A750 ran slightly hotter than the A770 in both FurMark and Metro while also running higher fan speeds. Perhaps our particular A750 is a relatively poor sample, or the A770 is a cherry sample, but it certainly looks like the A770 will behave far better in more tasks.
We also test noise levels with an SPL meter (sound pressure level) aimed between the two fans at a distance of about 10cm. That helps to minimize the impact of the CPU cooling fans (the extra graphics card had its fans stopped and wasn't a factor).
We measured idle noise of 31.3 dB(A), which is basically the limit of our SPL meter — anything below 30 dB(A) is out of range. The Arc GPUs support having the fans stop completely when the chips are cool enough, but idle power is a bit high (around 50W right now), which results in the fans almost always spinning. So under load, the A750 got a bit louder than the A770, with 47.8 dB(A) compared to 46.0 dB(A).
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