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Intel might be new to the graphics card market. Still, it's had motherboards, NUCs, and numerous other products over the years and obviously has plenty of expertise when it comes to manufacturing. That's definitely apparent when you look at the Arc A770 Limited Edition and consider this is the first consumer graphics card Intel has shipped in over two decades.
Intel will sell cards under its own label under the "Limited Edition" brand. However, think of them as vehicles with an "LE" suffix because these won't be limited production runs. As long as Intel continues to sell Arc GPUs, it intends to sell Limited Edition cards. The A770 Limited Edition represents the current halo product from the Arc family, with the fully enabled ACM-G10 die along with 16GB of 17.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory. There will also be partner cards, but those may opt for either 16GB like Intel's card, or 8GB — with a presumably lower price. Frankly, considering Intel only recommends a $20 difference in pricing between the 8GB and 16GB A770 cards, we see little reason to bother with an 8GB model.
The A770 LE has two custom 85mm fans with 15 blades each. The card weighs 1080g and measures 268x110x38mm, a traditional 2-slot design. Compared to some of the other monster cards we've seen in the past generation, the A770 LE is relatively compact, though the competing RTX 3060 and RX 6650 XT are similarly sized and use less power. We'll get to power and noise measurements later, but the fans and cooler do appear to do a good job.
The A770 LE comes with a decent amount of RGB lighting, including a USB cable that connects to a motherboard port that allows control of the lighting effects. In addition, there are glowing rings around the fans, a lighting strip that extends around the outside edge of the card, and an additional lighting strip on the side opposite the fans. The default color scheme is blue, with purple/pink segments lit up that move around the card.
Intel's card comes with 8-pin and 6-pin PEG power connectors. Note that on the review samples, these are colored gray and black (or at least darker gray), but the retail products will have two black connectors. The card runs with a 225W TBP (Total Board Power) at stock, with a decent amount of headroom for overclocking should you want to boost the power limit.
Internally, the heatsink uses a large vapor chamber to cool the GPU and memory, which is a higher-end cooling solution and not something we normally see on midrange and lower cards. Even though the card isn't particularly large and has a higher power draw than competing GPUs, the overall results during testing have been good.
Video outputs consist of the typical triple DisplayPort and a single HDMI that's become almost universal among modern GPUs. Note that this is the first GPU with DisplayPort 2.0 support, sort of, which should allow for higher refresh rates and color depths over a single cable. Meanwhile, the HDMI port is 2.0b, though a DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 adapter may be provided with some cards.
Intel Arc GPUs can support up to DisplayPort 2.0 UHBR 10 data rates, but not UHBR 13.5 or UHBR 20.
It's important to note that Intel classifies the DisplayPort as "1.4a, DP 2.0 10G Ready" — likely due to the lack of DP 2.0 displays. Intel Arc can support up to UHBR 10 data rates, but not UHBR 13.5 or UHBR 20. That makes the DP 2.0 10G a modest 24% improvement in bandwidth over DP1.4a. However, UHBR 10 and above switch from 8b/10b encoding to 128b/130b encoding, which increases the maximum data rate from DP1.4a's 25.92 Gb/s up to 39.38 Gb/s — a 52% increase in usable bandwidth.
The important thing (for some) will be that Arc can support up to 8K 60 Hz resolutions, using DSC (Display Stream Compression) — 4:2:2 (maybe) or 4:2:0 (for sure) encoding. The display engines can handle up to two 8K 60 Hz displays, or four 4K 120 Hz displays. 1440p at up to 360 Hz is also supported.
Overall, the Arc A770 Limited Edition is an attractive design that should please anyone who's disgruntled with the overly gaudy and bulky graphics cards that have become so common. And if you don't like Intel's particular design, Arc A700-series cards from ASRock and Gunnir are apparently on the way, and Acer's first graphics card ever will be an Arc A770 with a unique radial blower plus axial fan design.
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