Arc A380 impressions

[mackerel]

The card arrived relatively late in the day. I slapped it in the system I prepared for it, consisting of:
8086k, Z390 mobo (ReBAR beta bios installed and enabled), 2x16GB 3200 ram, 1440p native G-sync 144 Hz monitor via DP. Win11 22H2

This seemed fine at first. Intel DSA was already on there and put the release driver on for me. I ran Watchdogs Legion first. Look good in a normal run, although I forget what settings it was on. I turned on raytracing and run it again. The lighting change was noticeable but at the end of the benchmark it seemed to stop for a bit. Weird. Not thinking more of it, I fired up Shadow of the Tomb Raider. In short, I observed a weird fps drop. It would look great at first, then drop to single digit fps, and slowly climb back to normal. Tinkering with settings didn't change it. It seemed to kick in a bit after a major scene change. Moving into Genshin Impact, I saw the same. I noticed in GPU-Z the GPU clock dropped right down, before slowly going up. Randomly poking around the OC settings didn't seem to do anything. Then I discovered the Intel overlay which let me see the same without using GPU-Z. At that point I found a newer beta driver and installed it. No change.

I decided not to investigate further, since technically 8the gen is unsupported even if I got ReBAR enabled on it. Instead I moved it into my other system:
11700k, B560 mobo, 2x8GB 3200 ram, 768p 60 Hz ancient TV via HDMI>DVI. Win11 22H2. Latest beta driver.

Since it was already installed, I went straight into Genshin Impact. I didn't get the slowdowns here. Tried various graphics settings including medium and high presets, and also applying 1.5x render scale on high preset to make sure I max out the load. All were fine. The graphical power of this GPU was a bit borderline for high preset, and in some areas I could feel fps drop (I have v-sync on with in game cap of 60fps). Sure enough, GPU load in those situations was essentially 100%. I found moving to medium preset kept GPU usage below 100% so it remains smooth all the time.

Ok, went to Watchdogs Legion. Did a couple runs without and with RT again, which went smoothly. Over to SOTTR, and again tinkering a bit with the settings it all ran smoothly. I didn't note the results for now.

I don't know why the 1st system had problems. Was it the old hardware? Was it a bad Windows install? Something else? That it seemed ok on 2nd at least suggests it isn't bad hardware. Now I'm debating moving the 2nd system over so I can try it on 1440p display to check if that was a factor somehow. Will do more practical performance testing tomorrow.

Edit: Oh, the card I think is supposed to be 75W class. It requires an 8 pin PCIe power connector. The power reported both by Intel overlay and GPU-Z was typically in 30's W while the GPU was maxed out. The OC limit default was 55W, although you can put the slider to 65-ish. This might get more interesting if I mess with the other sliders. I do wonder if the power reported is board or chip only. This was a point of confusion with AMD devices in the more distant past reporting chip, and nvidia reporting board.

 

[Evilsizer]

with intel rapidly updating the drivers, it may be another or two non-beta's drivers for some of this to be cleared up. i think intel has put more effort in to getting some issues with the A770 worked on first before going down. Though it doesn't makes any sense for that to happen, i would think any fix would be on all cards. i also wonder if intel is going to release updated bios's for the cards down the road for some other background issues, if there are any. IE the trial and error of finding a monitor that works with the card or is it the ports?

 

[EarthDog]

Thanks for sharing your expereinces!

I do wonder if the power reported is board or chip only.

For AMD and NV cards, GPUz reports that stuff/breaks it down on the sensors tab. If there's only one, I'd imagine it's board power (total) though. But IIRC, reviews show this thing a lot closer to 75W... so maybe it is core only?

Maybe that's only on higher end AMD/NV GPUs, but I know a TUF 3070 does (more budget) as do Suprim cards (high end)

 

[mackerel]

I sold the 8086k cpu/mobo today. Not going to be following that up at all. Haven't done any more with the GPU today, but I just had a look on hwbot. How many records do I want to hold? Not necessarily for very long. Also not seeing much activity on A750/A770.

 

[BugFreak]

I think most people are waiting for it to age a little. I know I am before diving in.

 

[mackerel]

First overclocking attempt. Running TimeSpy.

3315 Stock
3309 With +25 OC. Ok, that made no difference.
3572 Increase OC to +50. Increase power limit to 66W (from 55W), that made a difference
3512 Increase OC to +69. Am I on power limit?

There aren't many sliders. The OC slider has no info attached to it but it scales from 0 to 100. There's a voltage offset going from 0 to +265mV. Power limit at 55W stock, 66W max. Temp limit 90C stock, 95C max.

Peak temp was 65C on the last run I did, peak power 48.4W. It looks like this GPU can give more, but overcoming the driver limits will be needed.

 

[Woomack]

I saw info that you need ReBAR for these cards (as you noticed) or they get hiccups or performance drops. In short, a new motherboard is required, so it's a bad option as an upgrade for an older PC.
I like how they delivered quite good performance at lower wattage. I wish they had something that performs close to RTX3080.

 

[Niku-Sama]

i am wondering if board power is not reading correctly, they had a similar issue with a770s and memory speed recently.
maybe check it after a driver update when it comes down the pipe.