Mere weeks after Intel sliced the worth of its home-grown Arc A750 graphics card to $250, immediately propelling it into our listing of the best GPUs for gaming, the remainder of the Arc household is seeing some huge reductions too—however not from Intel. Instead, it’s customized board maker ASRock making the most recent cuts.

As noticed by Videocardz and others, ASRock’s customized variations of the Arc A380 and stronger Arc A770 are each out there on steep sale. The ASRock A380 prices simply $120 at Newegg, down from $140, whereas the 8GB ASRock Arc A770 is currently $270, a $50 low cost from its ordinary $320 worth.

The financial savings make Intel’s debut client GPUs far more interesting, particularly the ASRock Phantom Gaming Arc A770. It’s substantially faster than the $250 Arc A750 for simply $20 extra, and less expensive than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 it beats in DirectX 12, ray tracing, and cutting-edge AV1 encoding. Now that Intel has managed to smooth out Arc’s initial driver issues, the Arc A770 is mighty compelling at this worth…in case your laptop helps PCIe Resizable BAR, that’s. Arc’s efficiency tanks on older techniques.

The entry-level Arc A380, alternatively, affords extra worth for content material creators than pure avid gamers because of its distinctive AV1 and QuickSync-powered H.264 encoding capabilities, which you received’t discover in comparably priced Nvidia and AMD graphics playing cards.

Our deep-dive into the Arc A380’s AV1 chops goes into a lot higher element. Here’s the gist, although: “The future of video streaming is very bright, and significantly less blocky.” If you need GPU-accelerated AV1 encoding, selecting the ASRock Arc A380 up for just $120 is a no brainer.