Intel Arc A770 "Alchemist" GPU overclocked beyond a record 3.5 GHz

Intel's flagship Alchemist GPU, the Arc A770, has been overclocked to a record-breaking clock speed of 3.5GHz, making it the fastest on the planet.

Intel's Arc A770 pushed to its limits with liquid nitrogen cooling, achieves 3.5 GHz GPU frequency

The record comes from overclockers and enthusiasts, Skatterbencher who used LN2 cooling and ElmorLab's EVC2. Taxbench already has a detailed guide explaining how to overclock Intel's Arc GPUs including the Arc A770 and how to work around some limitations.

For the overclocking session, an Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition GPU was used that was mounted to the PCIe slot through a 90-degree riser, and a two-layer tape was plastered around the GPU to ensure that the ACM-G10 "Alchemist" die was protected from the weight of The CPU canister used to hold LN2 since the default GPU LN2 canister was not compatible with the mounting layout of the card. It is said that there are five major limitations that prevent overclocking of Alchemist chips which include:

The process to manually override and adjust each of these settings is explained here. Finally, the card was pushed all the way up to 3586 MHz with a voltage of 1.305V and a temperature of -50C. It was only good enough for a couple of seconds, but eventually the GPU would crash. A frequency of 3400 MHz (1.285V) was good enough for light workloads, while 3100 MHz allowed some runs in the 3DMark Test. Test benches settled for 3012 MHz at 1.12V with -30C temperatures enabling stable performance within all but one of the 3DMark benchmarks (3DMark Fire Strike).

The results for the Intel Arc A770 Alchemist GPU are very impressive with up to a 26% gain in 3DMark Time Spy. In the 3DMark Speedway Stree Test, the Intel Arc A770 GPU was able to achieve 3 GHz with 1.114V and total GPU power consumption peaked at 258W.

Hitting clock speeds north of 3 GHz is truly impressive for Intel's Alchemist architecture. The GPUs use a TSMC 6nm process node and offer better GPU clocks than RDNA 2 and even RDNA 3 chips. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's Ada GPUs are currently pushed beyond 4GHz, which is truly a sight to behold. We can expect some great watch improvements from Battlemage as well coming next year.