The Arc A770 Limited Edition, with its extra VRAM, will in fact release at $349, not $329 like I said below. My bad, but then Intel did have a whopping great rotating image of the Limited Edition on-screen when they announced the $329 price. My intentions were pure! Anyhow, here’s the original article: Seems it’s that time of year again: the annual Intel CPU refresh is upon us, with CEO Pat Gelsinger announcing the 13th Gen “Raptor Lake” processor family onstage at Intel Innovation 2022 last night. These chips will stick to the hybrid Performance core/Efficiency core design introduced by the 12th Gen Alder Lake range – probably wisely, given that includes some of the best gaming CPUs ever – but ups the E-core counts, L2 cache capacities and clock speeds. Raptor Lake will go on sale on October 20th, a few weeks after the just-launched AMD Ryzen 7000 series. The showcase also included a few key details on the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition, the top-ranking graphics card in the long-delayed Arc Alchemist lineup of gaming GPUs. This will also launch next month, on October 12th, and cost $329. Honestly, part of me was wondering if we’ll ever see the day, but yes: there really will be an Intel graphics card on the market. Even if it is more of an RTX 3060 rival than a cheap RTX 4080 alternative. To start with, Intel’s 13th CPU generation will start with three main chips, and each of those having a slightly lower-priced ‘KF’ variant without any integrated graphics. Here’s the deets in handy specs table form, along with current preorder pricing. Two observations! One, what on Earth is going on with those UK prices? In the US, it’s only the Core i5 chips that get a (modest) expensiveness bump over their 12th Gen equivalents, but on this side of the Atlantic it’s hikes across the board. I know the pound is in the doldrums at the moment, but yeesh. Two, unlike both Alder Lake and AMD’s latest Ryzen 7000 chips, there’s no big tech overhaul here; more of a general tune-up. The Core i9-13900KF hitting a 5.8GHz Turbo Boost ain’t to be sniffed at, though, and higher E-core counts could help liven up performance in games that take advantage of heavy multithreading (like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla). Here’s a gaming performance chart showing the promised performance gains, though you have to say, Intel are being pretty cheeky with that easily missable red dash showing Ryzen 7 5800X3D performance. It looks like AMD’s one-off CPU actually beats the Core i9-13900K in a few games. Feature-wise, all six of the announced CPUs will be fully unlocked for overclocking, and come with all the mod-cons like PCIe 5.0 support and DDR5-5600 compatibility. Though on the RAM note, Raptor Lake-ready motherboards will come with either DDR5 or DDR4 support – unlike Ryzen 7000, which takes DDR5 only. That could make upgrading easier, as will Raptor Lake being compatible with 12th Gen/600 series motherboard chipsets in addition to the new 700 series. That’s a rarity for Intel, who generally don’t make new Core CPUs backwards compatible with older boards. As for the Arc A770 Limited Edition, it’s a shame to not hear more about the rest of the Arc Alchemist range – including the standard Arc A770, which has half the Limited Edition’s 16GB of VRAM but should be cheaper, and the A750 – but at least there’s finally a solid release date for one of these cards outside of China. By all accounts, the Arc A770 Limited Edition is aiming at smooth 1080p performance with good 1440p capability as well, so if it can outperform the likes of the RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT while also undercutting them on price, it could be one to watch out for. That said, new AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards are being unveiled on November 3rd, and there are almost definitely more affordable RTX 40 series GPUs in the works that haven’t been shown yet; the Arc A770 Limited Edition will need to contend with these up-and-comers as well. I’ve requested UK-specific pricing and will update this post if I get it.
