Intel Arc A770 LE Sails Into The Sunset But What About Custom A770 Cards?
The Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition is dead, long live the Arc A770! In a mildly surprising move, Intel quietly discontinued its own LE variant this week, with a Product Change Notification (PCN) outlining the graphics card's change in status. If you happen to own one, it's now a bit of a collector's item and has already gone up in value, based on what we're seeing from marketplace listings.
While somewhat surprising, this isn't a shocking move. After all, it's tough to misinterpret what "Limited Edition" means, though it was never clear how many cards Intel would produce or how long it would keep making them after launching what ranks as its flagship discrete GPU. Now we know, at least as pertains to how long (we don't have data on how many GPUs Intel shipped).
You can think of 'LE' models as being equivalent to NVIDIA's Founders Edition branding, in that it employs the company's own cooling solution. And in this case, Intel equipped its Arc A70 LE with 16GB of VRAM, whereas its hardware partners could choose between 16GB of 8GB.
While Intel is retiring the Arc A770 LE, it's not abandoning the Arc A770 wholesale. Intel confirmed that it's still making the underlying Alchemist ACM-G10 (DG2-512) GPU silicon for its add-in board (AIB) partners to employ in their own custom models.
That means you can still buy an Arc A770 with 16GB of VRAM. For example, Acer's factory-overclocked and custom-cooled Predator BiFrost A770 is in stock on Amazon for $339.99. And over on Newegg, you can find the same card as part of a bundle with an Intel CPU (as well as by itself).
Who knows for how long, however, as that's the only 16GB model we can find in stock from a first-party (read: not a marketplace vendor) anywhere.
The Arc A770 arrived at a time when graphics cards in general were in short supply and selling at big markups. And until recently, AMD and NVIDIA didn't have any modern-generation offerings at mainstream prices. That changed with the introduction of the Radeon RX 7600 and, to an extent, the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. And at the end of the month, NVIDIA will release the regular (non-Ti) GeForce RTX 4060 to the mix, starting at $299.
As a result, the Arc A770 is a less interesting product than when it first released. At the same time, it's also improved since it debuted, with Intel's driver team putting a lot of work into improving performance (especially in DirectX 9 games, which was a sore point early on) and squashing bugs.
Meanwhile, there's been no change to the Arc A770 LE's status that we're aware of. That's also easier to find in stock—you can pluck one from Amazon for $239.99 right now.
