Biostar Shows Up Late To Arc A750 GPU Party But Should You Wait For Battlemage?
It's only taken Biostar a little over two years to launch an Intel Arc A750 graphics card, though depending on your perspective, it's a fashionably late entry into A750 territory—at this point in the game, Arc is far more mature than at launch, with Intel's driver team putting in a lot of work shoring up performance in games, especially older titles.
The model that's on tap from Biostar, the Arc A750 OC, sports a factory overclock at 2,200MHz, which is 150MHz higher than Intel's reference 2,050MHz graphics clock. Beyond that, you're looking 28 Xe cores, 8GB of GDDR6 memory (16Gbps) linked to a 256-bit bus for 512GB/s of memory bandwidth, and a 225W total board power (TBP) rating, all of which match Intel's stock blueprint.
Other than the overclock, Biostar somewhat separates itself from the modest pack by utilizing a blue printed circuit board (PCB) design, along with blue dual 8-pin PCI Express power connectors. Not that you'll be able to show any of that off once it's installed in your system, but hey, the color scheme there.
The Biostar Arc A750 OC also features a dual fan design with "Calm technology," which basically means the fans spin up under heavier workloads and sit at a dead stop under light workloads, so long as temps are low enough, to sometimes run silently.
There's no mention of price or availability. As a point of reference, however, you can find Acer's Predator BiFrost Arc A750 with the same factory overclock (2,200MHz) on sale for $204.99 at Amazon. Save for open box and backordered models on Newegg, that's the cheapest around right now, with other models priced at up to around $260 (like Sparkle's overclocked model).
One thing to note, however, is that Intel is reportedly pushing to launch it's next-gen Battlemage GPU this year, and before Black Friday to take advantage of the holiday shopping season. That being the case, Biostar's timing isn't the most advantageous for the company. Deals obviously abound during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and launching a next-gen GPU could lead to even more enticing bargains on current generation products.
