Introduction

Player 3 has entered the game! While technically the Iris Xe Max (DG1) is its first discrete GPU in decades, the new Arc 7 series marks Intel's first attempt ever at the performance graphics segment, a hotly-contested one where gamers playing at 1080p or 1440p pick up a graphics card to max out their eye-candy with AAA games, or give themselves extreme frame-rates for competitive gaming. The new Arc "Alchemist" 7-series promises just this, and with the metaverse taking shape, Intel is gripped with the fear of missing out on a potentially massive hardware market.



We have with us the Intel Arc A750 and the Arc A770 Limited Edition. Both these cards meet the performance-segment goals for a graphics card, and come with a full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and a feature competitive to DLSS and FSR—XeSS. We'll tell you a lot more about these in our full review of the two cards. For now, we've been allowed to show you the cards themselves!


The Intel Arc "Alchemist" 7-series media kit came in a large outer box, with several brown boxes inside. The brown boxes have printed surfaces on the inside. You're greeted with a slick graphic that reads "Let's Play." You open a couple of inner flaps to see the actual boxes of the graphics cards. There are separate such outer boxes for the A750 and A770 Limited Edition.


The actual inner (blue) boxes feel incredibly premium to the eye and touch; although they're made of simple paperboard. Each box opens out with a clamshell lid. Inside you're greeted with the card itself, nestled in foam. The lid has an insert marked "Let's Play," with some documentation inside.


As you pull the card out, there's another insert below, with another smaller box. This box contains a cable which connects the graphics card to one of the 9-pin USB 2.0 headers on your motherboard. This cable is only found in the box with the A770 Limited Edition, as that's the card with the elaborate ARGB LED lighting setup (which we're not allowed to show you just yet, but we will in our full review).

Goodies

There's more to this media kit than just the cards. Intel likes to hand out little mementos with its media kits, and this one has two really cute ones.


The first one is a delightful neon sign. This is a real neon sign made of a glass fluorescent tubes, and not a plastic LED diffuser made to look like a neon sign. It can be placed on the desk, or as a backdrop in video presentations.


The second of these is a really useful toolkit. This kit has everything one needs to disassemble the card, including its finer parts like the LED setup, or the fan impellers. It has all the bits one needs for PC building.