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GPUs and CPUs · Intel Arc

Intel Arc A770

8owners with an opinion
83%of verdicts positive
5/1positive/negative since 2024
2 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for reliability and software.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 2 yearsStill going
Been running Linux on the A770 for about 2 years now. Very happy with the driver situation. Was a bit rough very early on, but it's nice and stable now. Recommend at least Linux 6.4, but preferably newer. I use a rolling release distro(Artix) to get up to date kernels. ML stuff can be a pain sometimes because support in pytorch and various other libraries is not as prioritised as CUDA. But I've been able to get llama.cpp working via ollama, which has experimental intel gpu support. Worked fine when I tested it, though I haven't actually used it very much, so don't quote me on it. For image gen, your best bet is to use sdnext( https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext ), which supports Intel on linux officially, and will automagically install the right pytorch version, and do a bunch of trickery to get libraries that insist on CUDA to work in many of the cases. Though some things are still unsupported due to various libraries still not supporting intel on Linux. Some types of quantization are unavailable for instance. But at least if you have the A770, quantisation for image gen is not as important due to plentyful VRAM, unless you're trying to use the flux models.
Neutral
I have a 16 GB Intel A770 and before that used an AMD Mi25. I've had SDXL stable diffusion working on both, but struggled to get LLMs going. The entire field of software development is already well known for its technical debt and lack of interest in testing (see also: https://xkcd.com/2030/ ), but anything having to do with AI brings it to an all new level. You pretty much need to run the same stack the developer used, down to the correct outdated version of Python and every library in use, as well as the same GPU drivers and OS version, or the whole thing falls apart. Of course, various hardware vendors port everything to their hardware, so I could for example run Intel's OpenVINO version of llama.cpp, but I have the wrong Linux version to run their binaries, and I didn't want to put in the effort of running a new OS, but my computer couldn't finish compiling it overnight, so I gave up on it. Of course, I could put it all in a VM, but then I'd take a performance hit and need even more RAM.
Doesn’t like it
I bought an Arc A770 expecting that this feature would materialise based on it being available on other contemporary Intel GPUs, but it never did. Does the B70 definitely support SR-IOV from day one?
Likes it
I bought a used 16 GB Intel A770 GPU for $200, and it's capable of running pretty powerful open stable diffusion and large language models. Sure, I could get more performance out of proprietary models on much more expensive hardware, but there's diminishing returns, and consumer hardware and open models keep getting better. I don't think the big investments into hosting models will pay off, especially as the base-line capabilities of integrate GPUs become enough to run a good model at home.
Likes it
I love these breakdown writeups so much. I'm also hoping that Intel puts out an Arc A770 class upgrade in their B-series line-up. My workstation and my kids' playroom gaming computer both have A770's, and they've been really amazing for the price I paid, $269 and $190. My triple screen racing sim has an RX 7900 GRE ($499), and of the three the GRE has surprisingly been the least consistently stable (e.g. driver timeouts, crashes). Granted, I came into the new Intel GPU game after they'd gone through 2 solid years of driver quality hell, but I've been really pleased with Intel's uncharacteristic focus and pace of improvement in both the hardware and especially the software. I really hope they keep it up.
Neutral
I also have an A770. Don't use it for AI, but it runs fine for general 3D use (which mostly means either Minecraft, other similarly casual games, or demoscene shaders). I'm pretty sure I'm not utilizing it fully most of the time. My main complaint is that the fan control just doesn't work. They stay at low speed or off no matter how hot the card gets, until it shuts down due to overheating. Apparently there's a firmware update to fix this, but you need Windows to flash it. You can zip-tie a spare fan somewhere pointing at the card... Secondary complaint is that it's somehow not compatible with Linux's early boot console, so there's no graphical output until the driver is loaded. You'd better have ssh enabled while setting it up. It's also incompatible with MBR/BIOS boot since it doesn't include an option ROM or whatever is needed to make that work - so I switched to UEFI (which I thought I was already using). When I ran a shader "competition" some people's code with undefined behaviour ran differently on my GPU than theirs. That's unavoidable regardless of brand and not an Intel thing at all.
Likes it
Bit disappointed there's no 16gig(or more) version. But absolutely thrilled the rumours of Intel discrete graphics' demise were wildly exaggerated(looking at you, Moore's Law is Dead...). Very happy with my A770. Godsend for people like me who want plenty VRAM to play with neural nets, but don't have the money for workstation GPUs or massively overpriced Nvidia flagships. Works painlessly with linux, gaming performance is fine, price was the first time I haven't felt fleeced buying a GPU in many years. Not having CUDA does lead to some friction, but I think nVidia's CUDA moat is a temporary situation. Prolly sit this one out unless they release another SKU with 16G or more ram. But if Intel survives long enough to release Celestial, I'll happily buy one.
Likes it
You are absolutely correct, and even my non-prophetic ass echoed exactly the first sentence of the top comment in this HN thread ("Why don't they just release a basic GPU with 128GB RAM and eat NVidia's local generative AI lunch?"). Yes, yes, it's not trivial to have a GPU with 128gb of memory with cache tags and so on, but is that really in the same universe of complexity of taking on Nvidia and their CUDA / AI moat any other way? Did Intel ever give the impression they don't know how to design a cache? There really has to be a GOOD reason for this, otherwise everyone involved with this launch is just plain stupid or getting paid off to not pursue this. Saying all this with infinite love and 100% commercial support of OpenCL since version 1.0, a great enjoyer of A770 with 16GB of memory, I live to laugh in the face of people who claimed for over 10 years that OpenCL is deprecated on MacOS (which I cannot stand and will never use, yet the hardware it runs on...) and still routinely crushes powerful desktop GPUs, in reality and practice today.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
By older Arc, I presume you're referring to Alchemist and not Battlemage in this case. One of my brothers has a PC I built for him, specced out with an Intel Core i5 13400f CPU and an Intel Arc A770 GPU, and it still works great for his needs in 2025. Surely, Battlemage is more efficient and more compatible in some ways over Alchemist. But if you keep your expectations in check, it will do just fine in many scenarios. Just avoid any games using Unreal Engine 5.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
This article is coming out at an interesting time for me. We probably have different definitions for "budget", but I just ordered a super janky eGPU setup for my very dated 8th gen Intel NUC, with a m2->pcie adapter, a PSU, and a refurb Intel A770 for about 350 all-in, not bad considering that's about the cost of a proper Thunderbolt eGPU enclosure alone. The overall idea: A770 seems like a really good budget LLM GPU since it has more memory (16GB) and more memory bandwidth (512GB/s) than a 4070, but costs a tiny fraction. The m2-pcie adapter should give it a bit more bandwidth to the rest of the system than Thunderbolt as well, so hopefully it'll make for a decent gaming experience too. If the eGPU part of the setup doesn't work out for some reason, I'll probably just bite the bullet and order the rest of the PC for a couple hundred more, and return the m2-pcie adapter (I got it off of Amazon instead of Aliexpress specifically so I could do this), looking to end up somewhere around 600 bux total. I think that's probably a more reasonable price of entry for something like this for most people. Curious if anyone else has experience with the A770 for LLM? Been looking at Intel's https://github.com/intel/ipex-llm project and it looked pretty promising, that's what made me pull the trigger in the end. Am I making a huge mistake?
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
The A770 actually has more transistors than the RTX 3070 Ti: RTX 3070 Ti: 17,400 million transistors A770: 21,700 million transistors https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3070-ti.c3... https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-a770.c3914 It has taken Nvidia decades to figure out how to use transistors as efficiently as it does. It was unlikely for Intel to come close with their first discrete GPU in decades. That said, it is possible that better drivers would increase A770 performance, although I suspect that reaching parity with the RTX 3070 Ti would be a fantasy. The RTX 3070 Ti has both more compute and more memory bandwidth. The only advantage the A770 has on its side is triple the L2 cache. To make matters worse for Intel, I am told that games tend to use vendor specific extensions to improve shader performance and those extensions are of course not going to be available to Intel GPUs running the same game. I am under the impression that this is one of the reasons why DXVK cannot outperform the Direct3D native stack on Nvidia GPUs. The situation is basically what Intel did to AMD with its compiler and the MKL in reverse. In specific, information in these extensions is here: https://gpuopen.com/amd-gpu-services-ags-library/ https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/path-tracing/nvapi/get-star... Also, I vaguely recall that Doom Eternal used some AMD extension that was later incorporated into vulkan 1.1, but unless ID Software updated it, only AMD GPUs will be…
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
The Intel A770 is currently $230 and 48GB of GDDR6 is only like a hundred bucks, so what people really want is to combine these things and pay $350 for that GPU with 48GB of memory. Heck, even double that price would have people lining up. Apple will sell you a machine with 48GB of memory for thousands of dollars but plenty of people can't afford that, and even then the GPU is soldered so you can't just put four of them in one machine to get more performance and memory. The top end 40-core M4 GPUs only have performance comparable to a single A770, which is itself not even that fast of a discrete GPU.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
> Similar sized GPUs from AMD or Nvidia are around 50% faster. Name just one that's not 50% more expensive than an Arc A770, though. I don't own an Intel GPU and have no intention of buying one, but if you're ignoring everything besides raw-performance then you're missing the point. This was an excellent first-showing for Intel, and their 16gb budget card hit the market right when everyone was pissing and moaning about low VRAM. It's a miracle they're not worse really.