Sparkle Intel Arc A310 ECO, 4GB GDDR6, 50W TBP, Short Bracket is Included, Low-Profile, Single Fan, Single Slot, HDMI x1, Mini DisplayPort x2, SA310C-4G

If you are considering this card for gaming, yes the A310 has a little bit of muscle but you could probably get more value out of a different card. What makes the A310 special, however, is that it can slot into even the tiniest of buiids and turn them into transcoding powerhouses!And, for the retro gamers out there, I can confirm that this little guy can be the centerpiece of a pretty strong Batocera build. For modern gamers, the 4GB VRAM buffer is going to tie one hand behind your back right off the bat; further, while Intel has been making good progress in GPU development, they mostly compete on value, not horsepower. Likewise, certain games/game engines don't play nice with Intel cards so it's best to search for benchmarks on the games you know you will be playing to avoid any surprises -- when it shines, it shines; when it flops it flops.I purchased the A310 to install in a Lenovo M920X Tiny for transcoding and light gaming. In this admittedly slim market segment, the A310 is, in my opinion, the best option. The alternatives are nVidia's RTX 3050 and AMD's RX 6400. Anything beneath those, such as the GTX 1030, wouldn't be all that better than sticking with an iGPU assuming the CPU is decently modern.So, of the major options, the 3050 sports more VRAM, but what's out of reach for 4GB is generally out of reach for 6GB as well since an 8GB buffer is minimum recommended spec for most new games. Further, nVidia's offering draws slightly too much power for Lenovo Tinys, with some variants simply failing to boot, while also not offering significantly more performance in transcoding. As for the RX 6400, it has the same 4GB buffer and fits in the power envelope, but AMD isn't as competitive in transcoding as they are gaming, so the A310 has a clear advantage if you need a card that can improve both your productivity and gaming experience. If you are interested in gaming only, I would advise comparing benchmarks on your favorite titles and deciding based on that.Which card is right for you will really depend on your specific needs -- if you could fit a larger card in your system, then there are more and better options out there from all three GPU chipmakers. If you're looking for pure gaming performance and don't want to crosscheck your most-played list with benchmark outlets, tread carefully. But, as someone who has tinkered with all three, here's my assessment: If you need a versatile card that operates within the tight power budget and even tighter dimensions of a mini PC, this is the clear No. 1 -- hopefully Intel can bring some of their second-gen gains into an updated card in this form factor because, honestly, this has been the first (and only) exciting release in this market segment for years.

I really wanted the Battlemage B580 from Intel, rather than either AMD or Nvidia for a graphics card, and for video editing, it needed to be ideally an X16 graphics card and with at least 10GB of memory, or more, but the card was elusive as it was bought out by scalpers and resold on eBay. In early January, I found a listing here on Amazon for the Sparkle branded A770, the previous gen Intel card, also known as Alchemist.It's I believe to be a true 4K card with 16GB of memory and has had several driver updates since introduction 2 years or so ago and some of its early teething issues have since then become abated.It went into a 15th gen based Core 7 Ultra build, which also included a fresh, new chipset and socket and my choice was potential future proofing for at least a couple of generations, though that's no guarantee.Anyway, I run at the moment, a year old 1080P 22" monitor from Onn (a Walmart brand) and a Dell 27" 4K monitor. The Onn monitor is connected to Display Port via DP to HDMI dongle at the card due to it having a display port, and is 1080P, the Dell can do Display Port, but via the USB C connector at the monitor and full size DP port on the card and there is only 1 HDMI port.Sadly, the dongle does not pass anything higher than 1080P, so the Onn got that, and the Dell runs full HDMI for 4K.After all updates, including Intel graphics card drivers, Gigabyte BIOS updates etc, the card runs great and I think the image is a bit sharper on both monitors. Previous card was an older GT1030 from Nvidia that goes with the previous small form factor Dell that this current PC I built replaces.Setting it up for 2 monitors took a few minutes but I was able to get it set up, and have the mouse move between them.Preliminary trial of Davinci Resolve 19 (most recent version) on a 1080P timeline not optimized yet showed mostly all smooth scrubbing of H.264 footage. Not bad at all.Really like this card and just FYI, like most cards of recent generations, 3 Display Ports and one HDMI port, while they technically can do upwards of 8K with the latest iterations of both the Display Port specs and HDMI specs, the card itself, depending on the model you have may not be capable of doing 4K without struggling for anything but playback of video, let alone many games and not produce higher frame rates.Likely not anything as powerful as a 4090 or 5090, but it is not a 2000 dollar card for the 5090, but instead, sells for under 350 US.While it is not the latest iteration of XeSS 2, it has many of the current Battlemage specs via software/driver updates for Battlemage as well. So far it's stable and works smoothly.Glad I went ahead with getting this card as the B580 has been hard to find.

First off, this thing is great if you're on a budget and just need something to game. There's some issues with support for older titles, but otherwise it's a respectable option. This isn't what I bought it for though.The Arc series of GPUs have absolutely fantastic hardware accelerated GPU encoding and decoding, making them ideal for NAS systems. I use this in my NAS to run transcode for Plex so everyone in my home can be watch multiple streams of movies we own, transcoded in great quality on the fly.The card is small, quiet, cool and light for my use case, so it has a nice home in my server rack in my living room.