PC Upgrade with the Intel Arc A770

hey everyone remember this just a few years ago we built this PC together you and I and I showed you step by step how to do it from scratch how to choose your parts how to put it together how to test it how to install all your software we had a grand time I think but like any computer that you build eventually the time comes where you want to upgrade it and that is one of the best parts of building your own is you get to do that now for this I have the great Fortune of having the new Intel arc a770 graphics card right here I am honestly thrilled to get the chance to test this out I also have the a750 which you may have noticed and we're going to pop this into this computer to run some tests on productivity software I really want to see how this works for things like Adobe Creative Suite DaVinci resolved things like that but not only are we upgrading the GPU but I'm also going to be upgrading the vast majority of this computer the motherboard the CPU and the ram of course I'm going to keep what I can from it including the solid state drives the main hard drive CPU fan and the case but we're upgrading it for really just one reason and that's because I want to take advantage of something called hyper encode which combines the hardware encoding capabilities of the a770 with that of the quick sync encoder on the CPU this is the core i7 13700k this is on the new 13th gen series chips but hyper encode is only available on 12th and 13th gen whereas we here have a 9900 KF in the computer so a little too old CPU is still great by the way but it is unfortunately not compatible with Hyper and code which is why we're overhauling the whole system we can't save Ram because we're switching to ddr5 here and you may notice that we actually have a z690 series motherboard here which is technically a 12th gen series but is compatible with the 13th gen CPU so we're able to move along I'm going to really Blaze through this today because unlike the last video I'm not going to go through the entire build process but I will show you how you can save certain parts upgrade what you have and you know try to make the most of your existing build now as a general precaution suggestion I have for people who are doing an upgrade like this is that you should always back up what you have because I prefer and I highly recommend that you do a fresh OS installation I'm going to do one here so I've already backed up what I needed it wasn't much but we have that just sitting on flash drives I've also gone ahead and downloaded all the drivers for this motherboard in advance so that when I start up I don't have to worry about downloading anything I don't have to worry about finding the latest version versus the one that automatically downloads and it just speeds up the process overall so before we begin what can we save well we obviously can't save the motherboard RAM and CPU we're changing those but we can save the case because cases are largely standardized and there's no reason to upgrade this I have no desire to add much more to this in terms of cards or drives it's all good we can save the CPU Cooler surprisingly enough because we were lucky enough to get an upgrade kit for the new Mount now I can also save the wireless unit but I don't really need to because this has Wi-Fi built in I can save the solid state drive and I can save the hard drive now what's going to happen with all that old leftover Hardware well first off it's not that old it's what three years old that's that's great these days computers last a long time now but that's for a future video so let's clear the workspace open up the case and start taking apart this computer so I can finally do some upgrades okay so here is our 2020 build as I said back then save your motherboard box I have hours here with all the documentation extra cables brackets and screws which will come in handy today I'll open the case up and get started we need to take out the GPU and the Wi-Fi cards first disconnect all the cabling and then take the motherboard itself out with the cooler still attached outcome the expansion cards the pcie slot for the GPU has a latch on it that locks the card into place so you might need to delicately push the latch down with a flathead screwdriver or similar if you can't physically access it with your hands like I'm doing here next come the motherboard screws I also took out the case fans to make it easier to angle the board out all the power has been disconnected all the screws are out from the board so it's no longer fixed to the case and I have left some things on here obviously the CPU Cooler heatsink and the CPU itself are here the ram is here and so is the SSD and that's because I'd rather just reach in as it's already out of the case it's a lot easier that way plus I can start prepping the case itself all the cables are just here make sure they're out of the way as you try to take this out so yeah let's just go for it I'm going to lift it slowly making sure that all the cables are out of the way you may have to wiggle it just a bit and it should come out fairly easily there we go so that's the entire board out with the CPU still on it I'm going to put that to the side for now so first things first I'm going to take this out just put it aside we're not going to put it inside because last time I did that before putting the fan in I made it very difficult for myself by putting the fan and everything on inside I had to do so much reworking to get it to fit but now I learned my lesson we're going to do it outside so let's take off the cooler and heatsink after unscrewing it I'll carefully lift the heatsink off the CPU revealing the thermal paste we originally applied back then you'll want to clean the surface of the CPU and the heatsink to remove the old paste using rubbing alcohol and lint-free wipes in this case I used camera lens wipes which did the trick then I took out the nvme drives and dusted the empty case thoroughly not forgetting to take out the old i o Grill now onto the new motherboard I unlocked the CPU tray removed the plastic cover and carefully place the new 13700k into the socket I put the nvme drives back onto the board followed by the new ddr5 Ram so I've already got these attached here the screws and washers on top of a back plate going to put that on underneath the monitor I'm sorry not the monitor the motherboard and then just flip it back down make sure it doesn't fall out like it just did the dark Rock 4 cooler we had before needed to be upgraded to support the new socket so I have fixed those and then applied some thermal paste to the CPU but I'm redoing this bracket because the instructions kind of misguided me in putting them this way sort of parallel to all the pcie lanes instead of this way parallel to the ram which is the typical way but I was trying to follow their instructions it's not a big deal [Music] finally it's time to put in the new board so here we go we've got it right here the CPU and the cooler are on RAM is in SSD is in so once we get it in here we can start connecting all the cables so I'm going to make sure that I angle everything out of the way be very careful just delicately start leaning it in making sure to move any power cables out of the way and aligning the i o ports on the back just got to get that cable out of the way great okay seated it in and it looks like we've got everything in there okay time to screw the new board into the case after that I replug the front panel headers and power cables then at last came the GPU The Arc a770 and a750 both use an 8 Pin and six pin connection from the power supply so there's nothing too crazy here at last we are done I've got everything in here the only thing that kind of tripped me up a bit was the CPU Cooler as I said the instructions had me placing the bracket the wrong way I got it fixed it's all good the other thing was that this board now requires an additional ATX 12 volt connection so I had to run another wiring and then get a couple of more headers placed on the board something that's very interesting I have no idea what it's used for yet I guess we'll find out when we set everything up but there is actually a USB header that comes from the arc card to the board and I have no idea what it's for I thought all communication could be done through the board itself so not sure why but we'll find out soon enough and then everything else kind of sat back in here just fine I'm shocked at the clearance on the CPU fan I'm shocked in the clearance of the fans themselves so I'm going to close this up we're going to take a break I'll come back next week to shoot a little bit more and we'll finally put this to the test well well well here we are everyone Welcome to our new desk and Studio space what better way to inaugurate it then with a new computer I can't think of a better way so unlike our past video where we went through the first boot up and software installation we're going to skip all that today and go straight to the tests one thing I do want to mention though is that yes we did in fact have to update the bios of the motherboard to support the 13700k and the process was Flawless for those following a similar upgrade path always check for a newer bios revision that supports the newest CPU anyway First Impressions installing the arc drivers was easy and since Intel's driver assistant makes it as effortless as their chipset drivers I didn't have to bother downloading a separate driver package for the art card I gotta say the UI and general layout of the arc drivers is refreshingly clean and simple you have Pages for General driver overview to check updates a games page which lets you customize graphic settings on the GPU level with auto detection of installed games and a performance tab which gives you a clean readout of GPU and system resources in general there's also an entire streaming section for streaming gameplay directly from the card but we've got a lot to talk about here so let's move on Adobe Premiere Performance is normally split between CPU and GPU depending on what you're doing but I chose a fairly basic project here to Simply scrub through and see how the GPU is being hit the arc series Works in premier's Mercury engine via opencl and right out of the gate that's really good news scrubbing and shuttling through the timeline was super fast with only minor pauses here and there and yes the 13700k we have in here definitely does have an impact on performance but looking over at the arc performance page CPU utilization was actually very low usually around five percent or so with the occasional spike in usage while GPU performance was around 17 to 22 with the occasional tick up to around 40 percent it's fascinating to see the vram usage in throughput by the way the real test of course was rendering though which surprised me even more since we're interested in the quick sync encoder I immediately went to hevc and encoded a 14 minute 10 second video at 35 megabits in 4k shockingly the CPU was still down to about two to five percent while GPU use was decently utilized at around 40 to 60 percent depending on the scene this is not what I expected and clearly Premiere can utilize the r cards pretty well granted this percentage is likely split between GPU rendering and GPU encoding but still it's promising the resulting file completed in just 7 Minutes 33 seconds moving over to DaVinci Resolve I opened another project and did pretty much the same test though of course with a different project hardware hevc and 4K output at 35 megabits for an 11 minute 20 second long project which admittedly was more complex than our Premiere test the file completed in 13 minutes 55 seconds now hold on a sec compared to the rest of the tests this was the only one where performance left something to be desired but this could come down to optimization or more specifically the complexity of the project there was a particular shot in this video where a 96 megapixel still image appears on screen that brought the export to a crawl by crawl I mean 0.5 to 1 FPS yes contrast that to the rest of the export running well over 30 FPS in most sections sometimes up to 70. it's likely that there's a bottleneck somewhere in the process and this is probably not indicative of overall performance shuttling and scrubbing performance was responsive and snappy as you can see resolve would occasionally ping the CPU into the 70 range but usually settle down into the five to ten percent area with the GPU sitting around 30 pretty consistently now during the render test CP you use again hit around five to ten percent most of the time with the GPU saturating up to the mid 80s sometimes up to the mid 90s now as far as utilization is concerned this is pretty good to see but also like I said this was the only test where the performance was lacking now here's where things get interesting I normally look at handbrake to compare cpu-based software encoding to Hardware encoding but in this case I wanted to look at handbrake for two features it offers over other options for now at least one is its support for av1 encoding av1 is a new video compression format that promises even more efficiency than hevc and its main draw of course is that it's a royalty-free codec now that's a bigger conversation for a different video but what matters here is that the arc cards are some of the first easily accessible Hardware av-1 encoders you can get along of course with the 13th gen Intel CPUs as well handbrake gives us easy access to those encoders the other key feature here that's a little more difficult to isolate is Intel's hyper encode which combines the power of the quick sync encoder on the CPU with the arcs encoders as well giving you even faster output from what I can gather this is an automatic process for handbrake as there doesn't seem to be a toggle that enables or disables hyper encode but just to be sure I'm going to compare this to a straight Adobe Media encode process as well so here's what I did I created a prores version of our Premiere project from earlier to give handbrake a clean starting point this also means that it has to be CPU decoded I then exported a hardware hevc file this time only at 15 megabits which I'll explain in a bit handbrake finished the file in just 5 minutes 25 seconds at an average of 63.88 FPS in other words very fast I then took this same progress file back into Adobe Media encoder and ran the same encode at 15 megabits again now to my knowledge Premiere doesn't yet utilize hyper encode or at least there's no documentation that indicates this the file completed in 8 minutes 12 seconds now DaVinci Resolve also claims to support hyper and code and av1 for that matter putting the same file through there resulted in an encode time of 5 minutes 45 seconds that's just 20 seconds longer than handbrake which means we can probably safely say that they're using the additional Hardware resources over Premiere by the way how does av1 compare to hevc at such a low bid rate I exported 15 megabits in this test because quite frankly it's a tragically low bit rate to use for 4K video and that's kind of the point anytime there's a new codec on the scene here's a handful of 200 cropped still frames from both to give you an idea so for our last test I wanted to do something a little different topaz video enhanced AI is a marvelous program really it's like magic and if you've never used it in some of your videos it's astonishing what it can do but I digress AI video processing is extremely intensive and slow to do even on the highest End Hardware you can get so I went through two workflows to see how it performed we don't really have a baseline here so you'll have to draw your own conclusions compared to your own Hardware but here are some numbers first I tried denoising some footage The Source was a 4K prores file that had been color graded to really show just how noisy the clip was originally by default topaz renders out two second previews which we used as our measurement because it's already slow enough denoising a 4K clip with the Proteus model resulted in a render speed of 1.8 FPS I know that's slow next I tried a different challenge grabbing an ancient clip from the b h Channel 13 years old in fact end up scaling it to 4K the lower input resolution clearly has an impact on performance here because it actually rendered at a faster 3.2 FPS that's considerably faster even if the numbers are still painfully low out of curiosity though I upscale the same clip to only 1080p not 4K leaving all other settings the same and managed to get 11 FPS in the real world this is all pretty good performance for this kind of process so most of our testing has been on the a770 version of the card but we also have the a750 which is slightly cut down from the 770. so let's take a quick look at the specs without getting too much in the weeds here the a770 and a750 feature 4096 and 3584 cores respectively running at base clock speeds of 2100 megahertz and 2050 megahertz so not much difference there interestingly they both boost up to 2 400 megahertz the most important difference though is the option for either 8 or 16 gigabytes on the a770 whereas the a750 only comes in eight gigabytes now again out of curiosity I swapped the cards and ran a few small tests on the a750 to see how it compared to the a770 back over in Premiere scrubbing and shuttling performance felt about the same and indeed CPU and GPU utilization was about the same too exporting that same 35 megabit 4K hevc file GPU utilization was somewhat lower than the a770 though memory usage was about the same this resulted in a slower overall render time of 9 Minutes 29 seconds on the strict hyper and Code test I went back to handbrake using a prores source again I expected this result to be nearly identical since these kind of features are usually baked into the hardware and I think I was right the encode finished in 5 minutes 33 seconds which is neck and neck with the a770 now lastly I wanted to see if the loss of cores had any impact on topaz since it can saturate the GPU so much surprisingly there wasn't really any loss of performance here the 4K denoising was barely any slower at 1.6 to 1.7 FPS whereas the 4K and 1080p upscale tests resulted in 3.3 FPS and 10.6 FPS respectively we didn't test games for this video but if I had to guess the performance between the two is probably quite similar except for cases of heavy vrams where textures could benefit from the additional memory on the a770 it's worth noting that the only time I saw vram use jump dramatically on the a770 was with the 96 megapixel image in DaVinci Resolve it's these sort of edge cases that might make you consider one over the other but in general it seems that their performance in video software is actually quite similar which is even better news for the budget conscious among you so we covered a lot today didn't we I love any excuse to build a computer or upgrade one for that matter and the arc series had me excited to try something truly new and different with this build as a new entry in the performance GPU space though there are naturally a lot of questions for pretty much every user out there well as far as productivity and video editing are concerned though I am happy to say that the performance of the arc series is phenomenal especially at this price not only does it perform well in general GPU acceleration as we saw with video scrubbing and shuttling but it has an extensive Hardware encoding feature set that isn't available on pretty much any other CPU or GPU for those wondering you get full hevc 10 bit 422 decode and encode here av1 10-bit decode and encode also completely new and on the a770 you get 16 gigabytes of vram which is unmatched on any other card in this price range combined that is simply huge for video editing in particular and at last that's our time with the Intel Arc a770 and a750 our computer has been revitalized with some beefy new hardware which I gotta be honest for what is basically Intel's first generation effort here I'm very impressed if you're looking for a new video card for your editing workstation I can't recommend the arc series enough and I know we didn't get to talk about it but don't forget they're very capable gaming gpus as well with support for Ray tracing xcss up and the latest HDMI and DisplayPort connections so let us know how you could use the Intel Arc Series in your next build in the comments below my name is Doug and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 5,174

Keywords: arc a750 vs a770, intel arc 770, arc intel a770, arc gpu performance, intel arc for video editing, arc intel gpu, arc gpu a770, intel arc, intel arc a750, intel arc a770 for video editing, intel arc a770 build, intel arc gpu, how to upgrade pc, how to upgrade my pc, how to know what to upgrade on your pc, how to upgrade your pc, how to upgrade graphics card on pc, upgrade pc, upgrade pc build, how to upgrade your graphics card on pc, upgrade pre built pc, upgrading a pc

Id: taycjv2ZRS4

Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023