Hey AMD, Nvidia – Intel Arc GPUs can also be massively overclocked as the A770 is pushed to 3.6 GHz
Overclocking graphics cards is generally reserved for the very highest GPUs – the ones that can break world records in this benchmark or the ones when charged – but one veteran overclocker decided to push Intel’s A770 to the limit, even though it can’t hold holding a ray-traced candle to the best graphics cards from Nvidia or AMD.
SkatterBencher managed to boost an Acer Predator BiFrost A770 to 3.59 GHz (at 1,305 V) — 50% faster than the GPU’s 2.4 GHz boost rate out of the box — in an effort to see what the best of intel can do like Tom’s hardware reports.
As always with extreme overclocking, exotic cooling was used to keep the A770 running so fast – liquid nitrogen in this case.
SkatterBencher explains that their goal was to take the title of the world’s fastest Intel Alchemist GPU, and to do so would require both reaching the highest clock speed ever on Arc and setting a record benchmark (among Arc owners).
The almost touching 3.6 GHz certainly qualifies as the highest ever seen. (The only previous attempt to boost Alchemist with liquid nitrogen happened a few months ago, but was nowhere near as successful, running into an apparent ‘temperature bug’, as described in this Reddit after).
In terms of setting a new benchmark record, SkatterBencher turned to 3DMark. Of course, the A770 couldn’t be used at 3.6 GHz, as the GPU was very unstable at this speed and was only allowed to idle for a few seconds before the system crashed. Ouch.
The best SkatterBencher could do with a light workload was 3.4 GHz. To run a 3DMark benchmark, a pretty demanding task (relatively speaking), the overclocker managed to hit 3.1 GHz at best, or 3 GHz to actually complete the benchmark run.
The results were new records for an Intel Alchemist GPU in every 3DMark test except one (Fire Strike), with Time Spy scoring 16,711, for example. That blew away the old record of 13,259 for an Intel graphics card (which was set at 2.8 GHz).
Analysis: An impressive first crack – so what about Battlemage?
Given that previous attempts to overclock Intel’s Alchemist GPUs have failed due to various issues, it’s good to see a major overclock achieved with liquid nitrogen.
Indeed, SkatterBencher believes that given that Alchemist is Intel’s first crack in a modern GPU, reaching a “maximum frequency of over 3.5 GHz is impressive.” After all, this isn’t that far behind Nvidia in terms of pure clock speeds, as the RTX 4090, for example, didn’t get much faster than this (3.8GHz). And the boost rate of the A770 here is practically higher than that of the RTX 4080 (3.615 GHz).
Can we expect more with Battlemage in 2024? Probably, since Intel’s next-gen GPUs should make progress on all fronts. The catch could be – if the most recent buzz of the rumor mill is correct – that there won’t be any more expensive (B700 series) Battlemage GPUs to overclock (which were rumored before). And maybe there are only B300 models, with no B500 offerings – and Intel is just going for the budget part of the graphics card market.
It’s too soon to make that decision, of course, but we’re hoping that the theories that Intel is seriously downsizing its Battlemage ambitions in terms of range size turn out to be wrong. Even if this turns out to be true, it must be said that budget GPUs with good value for money remain the most important piece of the puzzle that Intel could offer – as this is where Nvidia in particular often falls short.