Introduction

The Sparkle Arc A770 ROC is the company's newest Intel Arc graphics card. Intel's discrete GPU design has been on the market for two years now, with the next generation expected in 2025. With the "ROC," Sparkle wants to establish a special name for custom-design graphics cards with a factory overclock, similar to ASUS "ROG." we've known Sparkle for many years, back in the day it was an NVIDIA GeForce add-in-card partner going back as far as the 2000s. Nowadays, as a brand, Sparkle is owned by the TUL Corporation, a Taiwan-based OEM giant that also runs the popular AMD Radeon brand PowerColor.

The Arc A770 is Intel's top SKU for this generation, the other models are Arc A750 and A580. Both the Arc A770 and A750 are priced well under the $300 mark, and target the 1080p gaming space that sees the likes of the GeForce RTX 3060, Radeon RX 6600 series, and the RX 7600 battle it out. It's possible to game at 1440p if you know your way around your game's settings, or can take advantage of the XeSS upscaling feature, if your game supports it. The Arc "Alchemist" family of graphics cards are every bit as contemporary as the latest GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD. These meet the full DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set, including real time ray tracing.

Over the past two years Intel's software team has been releasing countless driver optimization patches, have upped their Game Ready driver support, and are now on par with the other two GPU vendors in terms of release cadence.



The Sparkle Arc A770 is built on the same advanced 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon as its lower-tier counterpart, the A750. However, the A770 maximizes performance by enabling all 8 rendering slices present on the chip, resulting in a total of 32 Xe cores. This configuration translates to 512 execution units and an impressive 4,096 unified shaders. The graphics card is equipped with a robust memory subsystem, boasting 16 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit memory bus, operating at 16 Gbps and delivering a substantial memory bandwidth of 512 GB/s. Communication with the system is facilitated through a contemporary PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interface, making full use of PCI Resizable BAR for enhanced performance.

Sparkle's A770 ROC features a relatively compact triple-slot cooling solution incorporating an aluminium fin-stack heatsink with two fans, and a sleek cooler shroud in black plastic. The PCB on the other hand showcases a vibrant blue color scheme. Under the hood, the card uses the Intel reference PCB design, which means no corners have been cut. The GPU VRM has been strengthened and is now eight-phase, up from six phases on the original Intel card. Interestingly, despite the "OC" naming, the card ticks at reference card clock speeds of 210 MHz base and 2400 MHz boost. Memory is clocked at reference too, with 2187 MHz. Sparkle's card is currently listed online for $300, a small premium over the current baseline price of $270 for Arc A770.