Intel Making Moves: Acer Arc A770 BiFrost GPU Review, Thermals, & Tear-Down

[Music] this video card is a little bit weird it has a blower fan in the middle an axial fan on the outside and to top it off it has an Intel Arc GPU underneath but all of those things made it interesting enough where we're going to review it today and do a tear down but what really sold us this card was a new exit in-house ad that it filmed for the Acer Predator by Frost now let's take a closer look shall we brush they also said this both utilize a rarely seen Vapor chamber to exhaust hot air as quickly as possible now I don't want to be the um actually guy but um actually Vapor Chambers are neither rare nor do they exhaust anything that is actually not at all how they work but that's okay Acer wrote the script for a Newegg so Ace there's more to blame here either way uh Newegg also we noticed had fire extinguishers in the background behind the GPU box in their footage so hopefully that was a mistake but we were prepared for something a little spicy just in case always gotta look at Optics when you're filming what's in the background of the shot because it might convey a message uh so this is the first partner model a770 reviewed in fact the first partner model Intel card we've reviewed period except for the gun air one that uh was just for the A380 so it'll be pretty fun the card is about 400 these days that puts it about 50 bucks over the Intel Le or they they call it limited edition design which is not actually that limited is just a name and we're gonna be comparing the two tearing apart the Acer card and seeing how it looks for Intel Arc gpus in the partner ecosystem and the partners by the way incredibly important EVGA Asus MSI all these types of video card vendors are who got Nvidia the distribution that they needed worldwide without them Intel can't hope to achieve the same level of success so this is an important step for Intel and we're going to see if it went well before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly thermal Grizzlies hydronaut and cryonaut thermal paste are high performing thermal interfaces for use on CPUs and gpus you can bring an old card back to Peak Performance by replacing it and doing preventative maintenance and thermal Grizzlies hydronaut is ideal for water Cooling and Air coolant for new and old cards alike cryonaut paste is one of the top performing pace for extreme overclocking with CPUs and gpus and has been used in several world record scoring machines learn more at the link in the description below Acer's advertising for this product is really bizarre but in kind of a fun way not and that's incompetent and terrifying ways so it's the better kind of weird marketing for example they say put on your winter coat because we've included two custom Technologies with this GPU Vapor chamber rarely seen in a GPU this technology streamlines airflow to circulate airflow okay quickly and efficiently just to actually explain how it works this time so Vape oh hang on this is a vapor chamber that is cut in half it's cross-sectioned Nvidia actually left this with us when their thermal engineer came out and the way they work has nothing to do with air really at all other than air eventually dissipates the heat somehow either from fins stacked on it from the chamber itself whatever but it's just got a bunch of copper pillars or columns inside of it that help with surface area and with some structural rigidity it normally has like a centered powder as you see on this one for additional surface area for improvement to Thermal conductivity and then there's liquid inside that goes through a condenser and evaporator process just like a heat pipe uh except in a way that's effective over a large surface area that's how they work it's not airflow fortunately their frostblade 2.0 fans are inspired by bionics or wait maybe not that kind but they say their bionics inspired they also say the 5th gen aeroblade fan is quote Custom Engineered all metal we don't have a problem with that one it's true if you look at the fan blades and finally they hit us with one that most of you will probably appreciate it says quote this product is not designed for cryptocurrency mining uses with some of the paper notes that were included in the Box telling us that it would void the warranty assuming they could prove it somewhat ironically there was a company once I think I still can't name that told us they wanted to use blockchain to install a piece of firmware on their video cards to then track what type of applications had ever been run on that card so in the RMA process they would be able to identify mining algorithms and then void the warranties it's not happening here as far as we know I don't think anyone's doing that yet but it seemed like a natural point to bring up okay none of that stuff affects how the card performs in the review it's just kind of fun to go through the marketing sometimes it makes the job a little more interesting so this has been hard to get in the U.S Stock's been in and out it's either popular or we think more likely the stock is kind of low for this it's Acer's first discrete GPU that is being sold to the DIY market so big step for Acer massive step for Intel because they need this Acer has made OEM cards in the past they basically take reference designs from Nvidia they've probably done AMD I haven't personally used one though and they ship it they might put a logo on it but that's kind of it so this is a truly this is a custom design which makes it a lot more interesting now because we had trouble getting this originally when we were interested in it we asked Vince from EVGA to buy one on our behalf because they were everywhere in Taiwan they were all over the market so he stopped by a local market he grabbed one and shipped it over big shout out to Kingpin or Vince from EVGA thank you for grabbing that for us he's still in the GPU game just a little bit of a different way uh I guess buying them for us at markets but we paid 600 total that includes shipping Insurance all that stuff to get it overseas but you'll pay about 400 in the Western Market the Acer card advertises a higher core clock than the Intel Le so that's why they stick the letters OC on here it's a little bit higher clocks and that'll boost the performance slightly we'll see that in the review now it also has because the unique design the potential to either be a thermal or acoustic nightmare or Marvel depending on how it plays out of course it could also just be it's fine so we're going to get over to the thermal testing lab and set it up and talk you through the results so in the GPU testing part of the lab time to get into thermal testing for this we do a couple things we test before and after disassembly so we have a baseline without any interference or tampering whatsoever and then we have to attach these thermocouples thermal probes to the PCB in different components within it for some more in-depth measurements that software will never give you so that's done after disassembly obviously but we have the Baseline to compare and make sure it all works the same and whenever they're all pads or interfaces are damaged we have like for like replace into them on hand all testing is done in a fixed ambient temperature of 21 degrees Celsius so everything is comparable between runs between different cards and all we do is run 100 fixed load we hook it up to a few thermocouple readers which we have a few different kinds of them this just happens to be the one that was next to the bench and we collect the data once it's at steady state we average hundreds of cells of that data and we compare it to the other GPU in a known ambient and a controlled environment so let's look at the thermal numbers here's the chart the Intel Fe GPU ran at about 73 degrees Celsius at steady state with the Acer bifrost GPU at 76 degrees these are close enough has to be insignificant it's not because of ambient we control it heavily but it'll come down to noise to see which did best here ultimately overall the Intel Fe did better in our task for GPU thermals on a tacticality but not for everything the internal memory sensor measured at 75 to 76 degrees for both so these metrics are the same the first vrm mosfet thermal probe we placed measured at 74 degrees for Intel's Le and 65 degrees for the bifrost allowing the bifrost an advantage this may be a result of a better vrm heatsink design which will learn about in the teardown later in this video for the Intel Le card we placed an additional thermocouple on a mosfet that didn't have an equivalent positioning on the bifrost but we suspected it would be a hot spot this one ran at 81 degrees on the Le allowing the bifrost an advantage 81 is still well within spec for the fets though so it's not really concerning it's just not as good it's as simple as that finally for the thermocouples that we placed on the memory we measured about 64 to 65 degrees on the bifrost and 70 to 73 on the le as usual the internal to external sensor Delta is about 7 to 10 degrees here the bifrost did better overall in memory and vrm thermals with the Le doing slightly but irrelevantly better in GPU thermals the biggest challenge with testing noise on Intel Arc gpus is actually the software because Intel doesn't have a formal RPM logging tool yet and well you can log it through gpu-z but the problem is it doesn't understand the difference between the two fans on the bifrost so we only have one RPM and it's actually the RPM of the smaller of the two fans so we don't have any axial RPM and that is where these pieces of tape come in because we used an external laser tachometer to point at the fans and measure the RPM while it was being tested on this bench which is built specifically for noise testing so this has a noctua nhp1 on it which is awesome because it doesn't require any fans and it can cool the CPU without any issues or noise whatsoever and then we have a power supply that spins down the fan under low load which this is so that also doesn't make noise and if we take a quick look around our noise Booth here this is our sort of temporary noise Booth we had this validated by a third party from outside of our company as being a 26 DBA noise floor which is extremely quiet without any AC or anything running and that allows us to get some fairly precise measurements for the arc card testing is done at a fixed 20 inches distance as it is for all of our noise testing and in a 26 DBA floor and then for the testing itself I did it the old-fashioned way I sat down next to the card ran the workload on it and then used the laser tachometer to log the RPM physically wrote it down and then wrote down the temperature and then wrote down the noise level because the logging tools are really just subpar right now for this but that's not normally a consumer concern so let's just look at some numbers as a refresher here's the original Arc a770 limited edition noise to RPM response chart at idle the card is functionally silent while spinning at 540 RPM the typical noise at steady state thermal is about 38 DBA which is overall good compared to other gpus it's at least in the average range and it helps that Arc gpus are relatively low power consumption compared to the higher end stuff from Nvidia so it's easier to cool there were three steps in between that plotted from 34 to 37 DBA adding the bifrost to the screen now idle is where it has the most trouble the card is always running its fans or at least hour hours was and that means a constant 35 DBA at 20 inches in our test environment that's a noticeable increase over the original room noise level it'd be understandable under load but this was idle that's with the blower fan at 1100 RPM and the axle fan at 1750. under load at steady state we plotted a 1350 RPM blower fan speed in an 1830 axial that lands the card at about 37 DBA and when both are underload their volume is about the same but idle which is most of use the bifrost runs too loud we think that Acer needs to fix this with a better V bios fan curve in the firmware it would be a relatively easy fix it's not a hardware problem we also ran some game benchmarks typically the difference between one card over another when they both have the same GPU at the core is quality of life features so it's going to be things like the physical size of the card the noise levels the warranty support from the company that sells it thermals things of that nature but gaming isn't typically on that list the only reason the gaming changes is because of a pre-overclock which this does have but you're looking at only one to three percent advantages so don't expect to see a lot there unless it's something like a Kingpin card where there's a ton of overclocking changes as well so that's what we're going to be looking at for a quick run through games these charts will only include two a770s they'll have the a750 as well and then if you want the full charge with all the gpus on it including Nvidia and AMD competition go check out our Arc a770 and a750 revisit with the newest drivers that has everything for it so let's look at the charts just briefly and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p we observed about a 4fps average Improvement in the bifrost card over the Intel Le that's about a 3.4 uplift which is at the upper range of what's normally possible on a board partner model without heavier modifications and Total War Warhammer 3 at 1080P and high settings we spotted an advantage of 2.1 percent for the Acer bifrost over the Intel Le those are about the same as expected Rainbow Six Siege at 1080p follows this pattern are in producing about a 5 FPS lead for the bifrost and average and that's a two percent Advantage for Acer's variation of the a770 GPU Final Fantasy 14 had the bifrost card at 183.2 FPS average it's about a 2fps lead over the Intel Le that's only a 1.2 percent Advantage so we're at the lower range of the typical deviation for partners we have more games but they're all the same as these it's one to three percent everywhere and that Advantage is consistently in favor of the buy Frost so let's move on to the teardown okay so this is pretty straightforward this is one of the easier designs I've ever looked at I mean by contrast this thing wasn't it wasn't as bad as the 30 series but it's it's really not fun to put it back together there's a lot of small pieces you might forget so this is very standard in that regard we're going to be doing this on one of our mod mats you can buy one on store.gamersaccess.net and we're going to be using one of our tool kits as well which is uh designed and hand selected with parts for GPU disassembly specific quickly we're going to track the screws on a grid whether or not you have one of our mod mats I would highly encourage if you haven't done this a lot at least get a sheet of paper and draw a grid on it and mark the screws so um because we can already see here on the back you know this is a standard larger GPU screw and then we've got at least two different size screws I can see here and you don't want to mix them up all right so very simple we're going to start with removing this back plate in the pieces that it's built in so there's a longer screw well that's a very short one okay all right so this is actually this this is one of the instances where uh I'm not just using the grid to promote everything I'm actually going to use that on reassembly because they everything about them looks identical but the actual screw length is very different this one we're going to leave for now that is a GPU screw this one is just holding parts of the body together so it's not going through the PCB like the others the PCB stops right here I'm thinking this should oh wow all right that was very easy okay let's see what they've done so this is actually really good I'm uh I'm way more impressed with this than I thought I would be so they did thermal putty that's what this stuff is on the filtering capacitors on the back of the vrm so all this you can see what was applied that's awesome a lot of the video card manufacturers including big ones like MSI Asus Etc they don't necessarily try to leverage their back plate this is a low power part relatively Arc is not that high power consuming so if they didn't use this I would for sure make a comment on it I'd say yeah if you have the surface area that all this metal back but you should use it but then I would have said but it doesn't matter for a couple hundred watts in this case they've gone the opposite direction where they've tried to leverage extra surface area when it's not even necessary which to me is a great indication of design competence so that's a pretty strong start they've got some pads here for controllers so that's going to be a voltage controller there and then let's see what else more capacitors over here with thermal putty on them as well there's a thermal pad for some of the sort of stray components that are scattered across the board actually there's a thermal pad for that chip as that I see as well so very good start from Acer all right next step now we're going to take out the rest of the screws so these are going to be going into the base plate I'm going to try disconnecting actually the cooler screws first okay so those are out let's see does this separate or do we need to it does not we're gonna have to take the rest of the screws out so I'm trying to track these very carefully because even just these two they're slightly different now we're gonna have two larger and four smaller screws to take out all right back plate or the bracket rather so now we can remove the cooler yeah we're gonna have three cables to disconnect those look like the pain in the ass connector which is the technical name so this one wasn't too bad even though the connectors were a little bit of a pain so this is very standard but not again it's not like an insult it's a good thing because they're dealing with a very standard amount of power that's generated in the GPU core where modern gpus modern silicon from Nvidia you might be dealing with 450 Watts maybe 600 when overclocked it's a lot and with Intel currently you're not really going past the the low hundreds so standard design works great for that what they have is a Acer is using a vapor chamber here you can tell because it's a chamber and there's vapor in it but also this is an indication of where it's sealed and vacuum shut so that's a vapor chamber that is on the better side of cooling solutions as opposed to just a copper plate with heat pipes generally good attention to detail about around the board where you can see thermal Putty for all the mosfets right there if we look at the front side of the board the uh the putty for the mosfets here aligns with the putty you're seeing down here actually what I just pointed to was these These are capacitors and then the middle ones the Moz feds they've got thermal putty on the inductors this isn't too important but if you look at the bottom of the heatsink area compared to the very last inductory you can see that there was never any contact here so missing some coverage on the the ends of the heatsink from the inductors not a big deal if it were a mosfet or a memory module I'd be much more concerned so that all looks good for the memory same thing they're using thermal putty it's more compressible so there's some advantages to it thermal paste spread is pretty good here it's very likely that they are using a a silk screen to apply it either by machine or by hand this is basically a perfect rectangle around the GPU and if you look down at the GPU itself on the card you'll see that it has pretty even spread across the whole thing there's a little bit heavier concentration over here but it's really not bad and while we're down there look at the memory modules these all have good contact a little bit of a gap down here but overall it's looking pretty good so we've seen enough of this stuff I want to move the PCB out of the way and we're going to remove this base plate that's what this part is called from the fin stack which is this and take a closer look at the fan the fan assembly and replaceability of the fans side of the card we on we're on the south side nope that was very easy okay we need to take out two more up here so we can pull the base plate off they don't have any contact from the base plate to the fin stack I would say that's an area where there's some pretty obvious Improvement that Acer could make if they wanted to this is already free got that uh got that Motel Six springy but go on for us that he'd think my only real criticism so far is going to be able to foam I understand what they're trying to do they're trying to reduce vibrational rattle from the fans and it makes sense because a blower fan is going to Rattle a lot more especially when it's made out of this really thin metal they have this thing on here about like aeroblade trademark 3D fan or whatever there's a reason other people don't use aeroblade 3D fan and it's not because Acer holds the trademark it's because a thin blade Metal squirrel cage fan next to an axial fan is going to be loud if you don't deal with the rattle this half of the fin stack it's all aluminum fins they've got four pipes running through it let's go ahead and measure the size are they really eight oh it says 7.8 but that's an eight mil pipe so they have eights there actually these look like tens let me just check for myself that's a 10. those are pretty huge uh bigger heat pipe not necessarily better but it can be it just depends what they're doing so you've got four going to directly over the GPU contacting the copper whole plate to the vapor chamber this is a good spot to be uh they've got good contact on all four to the GPU area so that's standard and good design then they've got the two larger pipes here hooking up to the other half of the fin stack and that's going to be dealing with heat from the primarily the memory which sinks the vapor chamber as well and then to possibly well the inductors will just by proxy deal with be dealt with somewhat by both halves of the fin stack but this side is mostly going to be dealing with heat from the GPU and the memory and now we get down to the fans so inside the Shroud here's the axial fan let me flip this over this is there's a logo there a little hard to see but that is a power logic fan power logic is a fairly large manufacturer of fans EVGA used them for years and years so very common user maker of fans it is a 12 volt 0.55 amp fan dual ball bearing for this one so nothing nothing abnormal there the blower is a Delta fan very big name in fan manufacturing and this one is 12 volts and is that one amp holy crap so this could be a 12 watt fan if you wanted it to be that's insane I haven't had this thing get that loud but uh that's going to put it into the thousands of RPM possible range and that would be An Extremely Loud blower fan so down here you can see the wall That's to project the air away from this side because that would be pointless it would just be going into the axial fan and causing problems they've got a foam strip in there too probably against reduced vibration and the last part up here is PCB this receives all the wiring and that's gonna be from the blower fan from the axial fan here and LEDs and that's pretty much all there is to this card so the bifrost on the physical side is actually it's built really well we think it's a very simple design so there's nothing impressive in the sense of uh there's no like mechanical or engineering feeds physically on the card that make us think this should be some kind of new design the blower plus axial approach there's a reason this isn't on more cards uh maybe a reason you could argue a design like this would be if your Acer and you typically design for a hot box OEM systems you're so used to using the GPU as an exhaust path for your hot air that builds up in the case that you can't get away from it so maybe they put it there and this isn't in any of the marketing but it is how it would actually work as a means to pull in heat from the rest of the system and shoot it out the back of the card now that is uh really not efficient in terms of the gpu's performance actually makes it worse obviously but uh it could work in an oem box for a DIY system especially one with actually good airflow like we would recommend on our Channel this Advantage if you can call that becomes irrelevant doesn't do anything and in fact it might only make things a little bit worse for the GPU but not in a way that's actually meaningful based on our testing today another reason you might combine these is if you're using a really large fan that takes up so much horizontal space on say a shorter card than this one and you can't fit another same size axial fan next to it you can put a smaller blower on it that would still get you two fans but without making in the card even wider in this instance they could have put another one of these fans over here and it really wouldn't be any different in terms of the physical dimensions in fact it could be exactly the same so there's no difference there the flow through design on the side over here that as far as Acer goes that impressed us just because it's a more modern way of thinking about video cards it's not something we would necessarily expect of a company that frankly it's a little bit like a dinosaur company Acer has been around a long time they don't typically show much quick Innovation they're they they follow but we don't see them at the front end of the curve normally so that impressed us just in the sense that Acer is doing something we didn't expect them to so that's good aside from the physical and the tear down aspects of this and it being actually really easy to maintain if you ever needed to they are 50 more expensive so versus say the Le version from Intel you're paying more you get one to three percent more performance in gaming for that it's obviously not worth it if you wanted to you could overclock it until I want to get there same argument applies here you can overclock the Acer one and it's an arms race but either way they're functionally the same in gaming performance you will not notice a difference uh visually as as a human player even though benchmarking software can see it so uh noise isn't any better at load than the Intel one they're about the same and the noise is worse for the bifrost card at idle it is much louder than it needs to be it's not loud in the sense that it's not uh like screaming and high-pitched whining noises coming out of the system or anything and it's probably about the same as the rest of your system noise but it could be quieter and it should be and Acer would really only have to update the firmware for that and change the fan curve so um so that's a little bit disappointing there because that's one of the simpler things but overall we think it's interesting I guess it looks sort of interesting if you're into that and uh vrm the memory thermals were better than Intel's Le so that's something worth noting as well but it's not something that will affect your performance and the vrm and memory thermals were still well within spec on the Intel card so it's not like it's taking it from concerning the parts are going to die to now it's better it's taking it from this is fine to this is also fine but technically a little bit better ultimately then the main reason to buy it we think would just be if you are interested in the look or you can't get this one uh maybe there's a bit of an argument to be made for a really thermally constrained small form factor box because you're still retaining some of that ability to jet engine the air out the back of the GPU but be because there's an axial fan as well they're a little bit in Conflict where instead of running one blower fan that's a higher RPM to have the stronger pressure to get stuff out you're sort of stealing from it because they're trying to run the blower at a lower RPM which is smart because they're obnoxious when they're high RPM but that also takes away the function of it in a sense anyway and that's also typically why you see a blower at the end of the card to force all the way through the air through the internal channels because they're just more effective that way but that's it for this one it's not bad and that actually is good for Acer that's where they need to be it's really good for Intel because they need some board Partners here they're kind of out there on the fringes and Acer's joined a little bit ASRock starting to join but that's it for now so thanks for watching as always you can subscribe for more go to store.careersaccess.net to help us with this testing by grabbing things like our mod bats that we did the teardown on or our tool kits or you go to patreon.com Gamers and X's thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 426,326

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, intel a770 review, acer a770 bifrost review, acer a770 bifrost benchmarks, intel arc a770, intel arc gpus, best gpus 2023, acer a770 predator, acer a770 predator review, acer a770 predator vs intel limited edition

Id: pfdNHdfenus

Length: 29min 5sec (1745 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Erlend05]

Hey! We got a board partner

[u/DSXask]

well nice to see acer in the race 😎👍🏼

[u/SYKE_II]

Lol Acer really cant help but put aeroblades on every product. Not gonna complain though, it looks cool, but the rattle and noise are genuine concerns from their laptop range.