Mere weeks after Intel sliced the price of its home-grown Arc A750 graphics card to $250, instantly propelling it into our list of the best GPUs for gaming, the rest of the Arc family is seeing some massive discounts too—but not from Intel. Instead, it’s custom board maker ASRock making the latest cuts.
As spotted by Videocardz and others, ASRock’s custom versions of the Arc A380 and more potent Arc A770 are both available on steep sale. The ASRock A380 costs just $120 at Newegg, down from $140, while the 8GB ASRock Arc A770 is currently $270, a $50 discount from its usual $320 price.
The savings make Intel’s debut consumer GPUs much more appealing, especially the ASRock Phantom Gaming Arc A770. It’s substantially faster than the $250 Arc A750 for just $20 more, and much cheaper than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 it beats in DirectX 12, ray tracing, and cutting-edge AV1 encoding. Now that Intel has managed to smooth out Arc’s initial driver issues, the Arc A770 is mighty compelling at this price…if your computer supports PCIe Resizable BAR, that is. Arc’s performance tanks on older systems.
The entry-level Arc A380, on the other hand, offers more value for content creators than pure gamers thanks to its exceptional AV1 and QuickSync-powered H.264 encoding capabilities, which you won’t find in comparably priced Nvidia and AMD graphics cards.
Our deep-dive into the Arc A380’s AV1 chops goes into much greater detail. Here’s the gist, though: “The future of video streaming is very bright, and significantly less blocky.” If you want GPU-accelerated AV1 encoding, picking the ASRock Arc A380 up for just $120 is a no-brainer.
Author: Brad Chacos, Executive editor
Brad Chacos spends his days digging through desktop PCs and tweeting too much. He specializes in graphics cards and gaming, but covers everything from security to Windows tips and all manner of PC hardware.