Introduction

Sparkle Arc A750 Titan OC is a premium custom-design graphics card based on the most popular model from the debutant Intel Arc Alchemist family, Team Blue’s first venture into a modern discrete gaming graphics card lineup in decades. Intel isn’t the only one making a comeback to this market, but also its board partner Sparkle. We’ve known this company for a while, as it was an NVIDIA GeForce add in card partner going as far back as the 2000s. As a brand, Sparkle is owned by the TUL Corporation, a Taiwan-based OEM giant that also runs the popular AMD Radeon brand PowerColor.

Although not the top SKU from the Intel stable, the A750 is Intel’s most important one. It is priced well under the $300 mark, and targets the 1080p gaming space that sees the likes of the GeForce RTX 3060, Radeon RX 6600 series, and the latest 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 feature, if your game supports it. From a feature perspective, 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.

While it may have launched a year ago in October 2022, Intel’s legendary software team has been hard at work, giving these GPUs driver updates that are some times more prompt than even NVIDIA and AMD at day-zero optimizations for the latest games. In addition to several driver releases a month, the company put out two major driver updates that brought sweeping performance improvements across games, as the company changed the way the hardware interacts with different APIs. Intel also vastly improved the frametimes, and promises a more fluid gaming experience. These add more context to our today’s rodeo with the Sparkle A750 Titan OC.

The A750 is based on the same 6 nm ACM-G10 silicon that the top A770 maxes out. It is carved out by enabling 7 out of 8 rendering slices physically present on the silicon, giving us 28 Xe cores out of the 32 available on the silicon, which is worth 448 execution units, or 3,584 unified shaders. These are backed by a modern memory sub-system. You get 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory bus, which ticks at 16 Gbps, yielding a healthy 512 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU talks to the system over a contemporary PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interface, which takes advantage of PCI resizable BAR.

Sparkle’s A750 Titan OC features a large triple-slot cooling solution that features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink, a triple-fan setup, and a cooler shroud in Intel’s favorite shade of blue. Even the underlying PCB comes in a refreshing blue color scheme. Under the hood, the card features a more than capable VRM solution that draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Sparkle is backing the A750 with factory overclocked speeds of 2200 MHz, compared to 2050 MHz reference. Besides its premium looks, gamers can also expect RGB LED bling in the form of an LED light strip running along the top of the card, next to an illuminated Sparkle logo. The A750 Titan OC is priced at USD $260, which is about $20 above the reference A750.