Intel Showcases Arc’s Overclocking Potential Along With a Teardown Of the A770
In a recent story over at game.intel.com, we see Intel’s Arc A GPUs in action once more. This time Intel has shown the overclocking capabilities of these GPUs along with a teardown of the Arc A770.
Arc’s Overclocking Potential
Starting off, Intel clearly stated that overclocking Arc GPUs more than the stock speeds will not void your warranty. A small overview of overclocking was given by team blue.
In general, GPUs run at varying voltages and frequencies along a voltage-frequency (vf or v/f) curve. As the workload varies, a GPU tries to attain the highest frequency within power and temperature constraints to deliver the most performance. As such, frequency and voltage are constantly changing.
Intel’s GPUs will run at atleast 50% of the specified clock speeds even in light workloads. However, if one wishes to overclock then the Intel Arc Control Performance Tuning feature will do wonders for you. Akin to NVIDIA, you can open it by pressing Alt+i (NVIDIA : Alt+z).
Sneak Peak Inside the Software
From the initial looks, we find a performance panel showcasing the live performance metrics. Here we can set various voltage offsets and increase the GPU’s power limit for enhanced performance. There also appears to be a few more tabs for Drivers, Games & Studio.
TAP overclocked the GPU far beyond factory clocks and the results are surprising. In a scene featuring a burning barrel, the FPS reportedly increased from 90–96.
This is similar to NVIDIA’s implementation (Alt+Z), although the ‘Games’ & ‘Drivers’ tabs for team green are present in GeForce Experience.
Arc A770’s Internals
A look inside the A770 ‘Limited Edition’ shows that the GPU features 2-fan design supported by ‘high density’ aluminium fans and a copper vapor chamber for cooling. The GPU ships with a complete black design from front to back paired with a full length backplate. This is a rather simplistic approach but many prefer it that way.
This thermal design promises a temperature of less than <90C at full power consumption (225W).
Oh did I forget to tell you that this GPU comes with ‘RGB’? The fans, ring, back and even the logo ship with RGB lighting that can be controlled individually by Intel’s software. To make the GPU look appealing even with ‘RGB’, Intel states that the largest RGB zone is actually the card’s outer edge ‘diffused’ with plastic microstructures so that no hotspots appear.
The PCB design features support for DP (Display Port) 2.0 along with HDMI 2.1. 16 PCIe lanes are available and the GPU supports PCIe Gen 4.0. The actual GPU is surrounded by 8 VRAM chips (2×8) for a total of 16GB of memory.
Conclusion
Since Intel has been hyping things up, we expect the Arc A lineup to hit the shelves anytime now unless Intel is facing supply constraints. Appuals will keep you up to date in this regard.
