Monday, May 1st 2023
Acer Arc A770 Predator Drops to $339 Once Again
Acer's Arc A770 Predator has once again been discounted down to $339, making it the least expensive graphics card with 16 GB of VRAM. While AMD marketing is advertising its 16 GB graphics cards with price starting at $499, comparing it to NVIDIA, Intel Arc lineup was not on their list.
Acer Arc A770 Predator BiFrost is one of the rare custom Arc A770 graphics cards on the market with fully enabled ACM-G10 GPU and 16 GB of VRAM. It has been previously discounted down to $339 in March, but quickly got back up to $399.99. Now, Acer has once again launched the sale over at Newegg.com and Amazon.com, pulling it back down to $339.99. It has a hybrid dual-fan cooler, combining blower-type and standard fans. It needs two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and has a slightly factory overclock of 100 MHz, with GPU base clock of 2.2 GHz.
Sources:
Amazon.com, Newegg.com, via Videocardz
Acer Arc A770 Predator BiFrost is one of the rare custom Arc A770 graphics cards on the market with fully enabled ACM-G10 GPU and 16 GB of VRAM. It has been previously discounted down to $339 in March, but quickly got back up to $399.99. Now, Acer has once again launched the sale over at Newegg.com and Amazon.com, pulling it back down to $339.99. It has a hybrid dual-fan cooler, combining blower-type and standard fans. It needs two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and has a slightly factory overclock of 100 MHz, with GPU base clock of 2.2 GHz.
23 Comments on Acer Arc A770 Predator Drops to $339 Once Again
A Radeon RX 6700 10GB has dropped to as low as 287 USD.
A Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB has dropped to as low as 349 USD.
Intel is so busy making people look at how much of a better value they are compared to GeForce, that they completely forgot Radeon.
Intel can put 16GB on a $339 card, but Nvidia can't do that on a $800 4070Ti.
Shameful.
I am somewhat surprised we havent seen more granular memory busses again. No 14GB 224 bit bus, for instance?
developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video
The thing I am most disappointed in for Arc Alchemist GPUs is the loss of hardware decode for VC-1 files. A lot of the earlier blurays used VC-1 and MPEG2 for their codecs. I know they are really easy to decode, and any multicore CPU can do it these days at real-time speed, but Id rather be able to do it with extremely minimal GPU resources than take up 6-8 cores on a CPU for the task.
(Circumstance changes over the years considered) this 'go' at the market from Intel has been infinitely better than their last attempt (that actually made it to market. Larrabee doesn't count).
That same 'failed 1st attempt' is now a collectors' item.
Hence, my interest as a collector-enthusiast:
Acer once sold components and Intel once sold graphics, in roughly the same long-bygone era.
(also, the 'larger memory' variants of cards typically retain their value better than their 'entry SKU', regardless of brand/history)
In my opinion, this is a better pick on a long term than 3060 (used to own one before the Intel) and 3070 due to higher bandwidth, VRAM and basically a nice clock -> mine goes 2.4 GHz without too much hassle -> this is probably the very same reason the Acer variant has 2x8pin additional power, instead the 8+6 configuration.
Also one more thing that I bet on when I picked this card is the driver support: if the drivers let's say are not in the best of state today(personally didn't have any issue so far, having tested a bunch of titles from DX8 to DX12 and Vulkan), by the time the Battlemage will come, this will also benefit from updated libraries and wrappers, so another performance boost :)
Also the price, being a little bit more expensive than the Limited Edition, it's still on par or cheaper than some better cooled 3060 versions up there.