I'm assuming the "don't leave the pc idle too long" is due to all these message the intel control centre spews out? oh, and isn't the ray tracing performance pretty good also? (not that its important to me, but it might be to who gets the pc). The other thing is cost, its a fair bit cheaper than I would thought
Idle power consumption is the problem. It pulls 40W+ even on the desktop, which is absurd for a modern GPU. Intel have issued guidance for a means to lower it to something more reasonable, but it requires both Windows and BIOS settings changes, and the BIOS settings aren't available on all motherboards. For instance, it's certainly not available on MSI's AM4 boards, which is what I have, so there was nothing I could do about it (which is one of the reasons I sent my A750 back). From what I understand few, if any, AM4 boards
do have said settings. I don't know about AM5 or which specific Intel platforms do. I've also read mixed results from people even after enabling the required settings, but some certainly have got it down closer to 10W.
As for general experience with the card, it really falls down in older titles. It was slower or no faster than the GTX 1070 it replaced in most of the DX9/10/11 games that I tried. However, you can use DXVK in many titles to boost performance. That's built into the driver to some degree now, but it operates on a whitelist system. Most games won't use it without manual intervention. In DX12/Vulkan it performs pretty well most of the time. I had no major issues and XeSS looked fine to me in the couple of games I tried it with, plus actually boosted performance to a good degree and more than FSR2 (which it doesn't on non-Intel cards). That said, whilst its ray tracing capabilities are impressive in relative terms, it's still way too slow for ray tracing in most games. In World of Warcraft it ran just fine with the ray traced shadows, but in Hogwarts Legacy turning on any of the ray tracing features (even on low) dipped it way below 60fps at 1440p/mixed settings, even with Quality XeSS enabled. I also tried it in Cyberpunk and that was also well below 60fps at 1440p with my optimised settings and any ray tracing on.
For what it's worth mine (the Intel 'Limited Edition' model) also had some rotten coil whine and the bright white logo on the side of it is super obnoxious. There's no way to turn it off that I could find. Apparently you can on the A770 LE though. Apart from that, I was actually super impressed with the cooler. It's extremely quiet, despite the small size. They've done a great job on it, bar the tacky glued-on backplate. It weighs much more than you'd think.
