The Sparkle Intel Arc A750 Titan OC Edition Graphics Card
Hi everyone,
Today, I have installed a new Graphics Processing Unit into my main machine. The card I chose is the Sparkle Intel Arc A750 Titan OC Edition.
The reason for choosing this card has to do with video encoding, with its Intel Quick Sync component supporting VP9 and AV1 encoding.
AV1 encoding is slow on the CPU itself, so having a GPU capable to do that is great. It is also able to encode to H264 and H265/HEVC. It can decode all of these formats as well, offloading these tasks from the CPU.
Since I use Linux, I didn’t went with an Nvidia card. Those are expensive and require the use of a special driver to enable the hardware capabilities. AMD cards works great on Linux, but they seem to not have VP9 encoding.
As I run this website, and new video technologies come, I thought this is a great time to encode my video library into AV1 using this GPU.
Now, time for the Sparkle Intel Arc A750 Titan OC Edition unboxing:
Unboxing
The card came into a wide box. Not surprising, since this is a long card:
Opening the box reveals a black box inside:
Once opened, there is a foam cover:
Taken out, it seems to come with a card for downloading some games. We also see the GPU and some mounting hardware:
The GPU comes inside an anti-static bag:
Now it’s time to open the bag and take out the GPU. We can see how it looks below:
The card has 3 DisplayPort and 1 HDMI ports.
Installed in the PC
The card fit in the PC. This is a 2-slot GPU but actually takes a bit of space of the 3rd slot due to its heatsink, making that PCI Express slot unusable.
For power, it requires 2x 8-pin PCIe Connector. I’m using a ThermalTake Thoughpower GX2 600W Power Supply, which has the required connector:
The PC booted, and Linux had no trouble detecting it:
The only thing was that currently, AV1 encoding was not a straightforward process. In a next post, I’ll show what I had to do in order to get it running on Ubuntu 24.10.
Until the next time!
You can get this GPU on Amazon using the following link:
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