Packaging

The Card

The A770 is a beauty. It comes with a clean and stylish design that could be coming right out of Apple's design labs. The black matte surfaces are soft to the touch, thanks to some rubbery surface application. The rubber isn't too sticky, it's very nice to the touch. The back of the card has a backplate, but not one in the classical sense, more on that further down on this page.


Dimensions of the card are 27.0 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 1087 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.0 ports and one HDMI 2.1.


The card has one 8-pin and one 6-pin power input. This configuration is rated for up to 300 W of power draw. If you look closely, you'll notice that the connectors are slightly mismatched in color. We confirmed with Intel that this will be fixed on future production runs, but some cards will make it in the retail market.


On the Arc A770, the RGB control functionality is provided through this external port. The included cable goes into a USB port in your motherboard. This is a surprisingly basic implementation, all competing cards send RGB commands over the PCIe bus to a microcontroller that's sitting on the GPU's I2C bus.

Teardown

Taking the Arc A770 apart is slightly more complicated than cards from other brands. While there's solid engineering everywhere, I suspect that the limited experience Intel has with building such cards is why some things are solved in a slightly less efficient way.

First, you have to take off the "backplate", which is a thin metal plate that's glued to the frame on the back of the card. Yup, glue isn't good for enthusiast end-users, I could have preferred a design with screws, as that's much easier to maintain. If you heat up the backplate with a heat gun, the glue will become soft and easy to remove.


Once the backplate is removed there's a bunch of Torx screws to take out, nothing out of the ordinary. Here we've encountered some sort of cooling plate that sits on top of the VRMs on the back—except there are no VRMs on this side, just an empty silkscreen on the PCB.


Now you can separate the cooler from the PCB assembly.


This metal reinforcement brace covers the PCB and helps strengthen it against bending.


Intel's cooler uses a large vapor-chamber baseplate paired with five heatpipes.