**In-Depth Review of Intel's Arc A730 M Mini PC**
Judging by these synthetic benchmark scores, we can confidently say that this Mini PC is capable of handling 1080p AAA gaming with ease. The 48.8 GHz Arc GPU, paired with a decent 79 fire strike and supported by an impressive 16.9 GHz CPU, brings the total graphics score to 8,957, placing it firmly in the top 8,830. With these numbers, we can expect seamless performance at 1080p resolutions, especially when considering that this Mini PC can also handle newer games with plenty of room to spare.
**AAA Gaming and Benchmark Scores**
The first game tested was Hell Divers 2, which ran smoothly at 1080p High settings with an average frame rate of 65 FPS. Although I had expected slightly higher performance, it's clear that the Arc A730 M is more than capable of handling demanding games like this one. The next game up was Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and using Intel's built-in Benchmark feature at High settings and 1080p, we achieved an average frame rate of 68 FPS. Mortal Kombat 1 also performed exceptionally well, with an average of 68 FPS at High settings and true 1080p resolution.
**Fighting Games and Performance**
The performance of this Mini PC was also put to the test with fighting games like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Although I have always had issues with this game on lower-end GPUs, the Arc A730 M handled it with ease, delivering an average frame rate of 72 FPS by the end. This is a significant improvement over previous experiences, making this Mini PC an excellent choice for fighting game enthusiasts.
**Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Call of Duty Modern Warfare**
Another popular game tested was Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which ran smoothly at High settings with an average frame rate of 77 FPS. In contrast, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 performed exceptionally well, with the built-in Benchmark feature delivering an average of 92 FPS using the balanced preset and XCSS set to balance.
**Cyberpunk 2077 and Power Consumption**
The final game tested was Cyberpunk 2077, which was surprisingly good on this Mini PC. Using XCSS set to balance at High settings and true 1080p resolution, we achieved an average frame rate of 81 FPS. This is a testament to the performance capabilities of the Arc A730 M.
In terms of power consumption, the system proved to be relatively efficient, with the CPU boosted up to 80 Watts during extreme use cases. However, idle power consumption was lower at around 26 Watts, while maximum power consumption jumped to 237 Watts when pushing both the CPU and GPU to their limits.
**Conclusion**
Overall, this Intel Arc A730 M Mini PC is an excellent performer for its size and price. With continued driver updates from Intel, we can expect even better performance from this system. While there are always potential issues with power consumption, it's clear that this Mini PC is well-suited for 1080p gaming and can handle more demanding games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Call of Duty Modern Warfare.
As for future possibilities, I believe that Intel could make a significant impact in the market by releasing a line of Mini PCs paired with MXM GPUs. This would offer users the flexibility to choose their own hardware components, making this system even more appealing. While we have not seen any such announcements from Intel yet, it's clear that this Arc A730 M is an exciting development in the world of mini PC gaming.
**Links and Resources**
For those interested in learning more about this Mini PC or testing it out for themselves, I've included some links to relevant resources below.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today I wanted to take a look at one of the most underrated mini gaming PCs on the market right now this thing is capable of playing newer AAA games at 1080P and we can even run some older stuff at 1440 over 60 FPS and that's because this tiny PC actually has a dedicated Ark GPU it's a pretty powerful little unit because it's the Intel Arc a730 M and given that Intel has put out so many updates for their Ark gpus and inreasing the performance across the board I figured it was time to take another look at this unit now there's a lot of other interesting things going on with this Mini PC and this is known as the mines Forum hn 2673 it's got one of the best cooling systems that I've seen in these gaming mini PCS because over here on the Le hand side it's got a cooler for that Intel Arc a730 M and it's got a cooler for the CPU so they're both over here we've got four fans and when it comes to that GPU It's actually an mxm form factor as you can see without the stand on it's actually a really small form factor PC I personally like setting it up vertically but you could lay it on the desk horizontally if you want to and over on this side it's got a bracketing system with all the cabling we need to add two 2.5 in hard drives or ssds so it can add a sufficient amount of storage to this thing also now moving over to the other side really easy to get in here but uh upgrading the SSD is a bit of a chore now it's not totally impossible you just have to remove a couple of these fans but as you can see we've got four fans here sitting on top of minus forms neat cooling system for this Mini PC so over on the Le hand side here's our CPU Cooler we've got an i7 CPU I'll go over the full specs in a second and if you take a look at the right hand side this is the cooler for that Ark a730 M now the m stands for mobile but the way this is set up is mxm it actually slots in here and if you're not familiar with the mxm form factor it stands for mobile PCI E Express module and we've actually seen this in some really high-end laptops so you could replace that GPU the one on screen right now isn't exactly the a730 but it's very similar so they do need to add their own cooling solution to this but it just slots right into the motherboard and in theory you could upgrade the GPU in here if you could find a more powerful mxm GPU so with this Mini PC we've got a dedicated graphics card and when it comes to the overall specs for the CPU this is powered by the Intel i7 12 650h 10 cores 16 threads six performance cores up to 4.7 GHz and four efficiency course up to 3.5 we can do up to 64 GB of ddr4 at 3200 megat transfers per second running in dual Channel with this Mini PC and of course instead of using the built-in UHD igpu we're going to be utilizing the Intel Arc a730 has 24 XE cores 24 Ray tracing units and the core clock in this can actually boost up to 250 mahz the way I've got this one configured is 16 GB of RAM a 1 TB m. 2 drive and we're going to be running Windows 11 Pro on this thing now I'll tell you what when these Intel arc graphics cards were released they weren't putting out great performance I mean they could definitely play games but over time with their driver optimizations just for instance here's a change log for their latest driver Assassin's Creed Syndicate up to 65% average FPS at 1080p with medium settings we're constantly getting new updates from Intel for these Arc gpus and they really do have a lot to gain from their driver as opposed to the other two big GPU manufacturers on the market right now those are really fleshed out with this definitely newer technology and these drivers are really helping in the performance area all right so I've got everything updated got a bunch of stuff installed that we're going to be testing out and one of the main things you need to keep in mind with these uh Intel Arc gpus is the driver update you just need to make sure you're up to date they've been releasing a ton of new updates fixing lots of problems increasing performance dramatically across the board as you can see we've got that core i72 650h 16 gigs of ddr4 at 3200 MHz we've got access to the UHD Graphics here with that 12 650h but we're not going to rely on those we've got that Arc a 730m 6 gigs of vam and I will show you TDP and everything like that but we've also got access to the art control center now with the desktop variance of these Arc gpus from performance we usually have some set that we can mess around with like upping that TDP with this it's kind of right out of the box because it is a mobile variant but it's in that mxm form factor we've also got our game launcher from here we can customize each one of these games from our frame delivery postprocessing 3D overrides right now I've got mine set up as uh global settings so everything we're going to be testing we'll use those global settings from the art control panel not much that I've tweaked and tuned from here but again keep these drivers updated because they can really really up that FPS I also wanted to give you a look at just TDP out of the box with the CPU and GPU here uh so from CPU I'm just going to run a quick stress test right here you'll see jump up to around 80 Watts which is really good for this chip I mean we can hit those boost clocks we need and of course when it comes to that GPU The Arc a 730m we're just going to put a massive load on this thing our maximum clock here is 2, 50 MHz and this runs it up to around 90 Watts now that's at full boat this is kind of an extreme test here but I just wanted to give you an idea of what kind of power this thing's going to be pulling and remember this GPU power is not split up between the CPU and GPU this is a dedicated GPU in this Mini PC next thing I wanted to take a look at were some GPU benchmarks and the first one we have here is the open CL Benchmark in geekbench 6 we got a total score of 73,5 and if we go down their list they do have a geekbench opencl browser over on their website and this is coming in just a bit ahead of the RTX 450 laptop variant and of course I mean we've got a mobile variant here just in a desktop PC so this Ark a730 is looking pretty competitive when it comes to 1080p gaming next up we've got 3D Mark night raid with a 48,8 79 fire strike coming in with a pretty impressive 16,9 44 and finally time by with an 8,957 graphic score up at the top 8,830 so yeah just judging by these synthetic benchmark scores we should be able to get some 1080p AAA gaming out of the way on this and you know with a little bit of room to spare like I mentioned at the beginning you could definitely do newer games at 1080 and if you wanted to go through your backlog older stuff like Skyrim 1440 High maxed out over 60 FPS but the first game we have here is Hell divers 2 1080p High settings we got an average of 65 I was actually expecting to see a little more but uh you know when it comes to those Arc drivers there could be an update next week that definitely UPS this performance either way I mean at 1080 High settings looking really good here it's definitely playable I also tested shadow of the Tomb Raider just using that built-in Benchmark High settings 1080 we had an average of 68 FPS Mortal Kombat 1 1080 high and we're not using any kind of resolution scale we could always go with Intel XC SS but we're at a true 1080p here High settings looking really good and you might see some screen tearing that's my game capture wasn't synced up correctly with the correct refresh rate of my monitor no screen tearing while I was playing the game on the monitor itself but we're getting a constant 60D across the board fighting games on this are going to work great at 1080p Ratchet and Clank Rift apart is one of those I've always had issues with on lower-end gpus be it IG gpus or dedicated gpus here uh not too bad by the end we had an average of 72 FPS and you can see we get much higher every once in a while 1080p High settings no resolution scale Spider-Man Miles Morales 1080p High by the end average of 77 FPS and with all of this stuff just turning vsync on trying to lock it down at 60 you're going to have a really nice experience with this Mini PC I also tested out Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 using the built-in benchmarks we're at 1080 with the balanced preset I've also got xcss set to balance with this Benchmark we had an average of 92 FPS and a low of 72 so we're well over that threshold this is another one of those really playable games and the final game I wanted to test out here was cyberpunk 2077 I was really surprised by the performance here given that we're using an arc GPU we've definitely had some issues with uh drivers in this game here but at 1080p high with XCS set to balance we had an average of 81 FPS so yeah I mean with all of these driver Updates this little PC with that Ark a730 m is doing a really good job at 1080p now the last thing I wanted to take a look at was just total system power consumption like I showed you when we got into Windows this CPU will boost up to 80 Watts the GPU boost up to 90 and those are extreme use case scenarios at idle from the wall using a kilowatt meter this is pulling around 26 Watts average 1080p gaming jumps up to 152 and the maximum that I could get this to pull in an extreme test maxing out the CPU and GPU at the same time 237 Watts so significantly more than a smaller PC with just an igpu but we are seeing some but we are seeing much better performance at of something something like this when you compare it overall I do think that this is a really awesome concept given that we've got that mxm GPU now if we could get our hands on more powerful mxm gpus and replace it in here that would be really cool and I was really hoping that minus form was going to come out with a line of mini PCS and mxm gpus that we could kind of pick and choose what we want to add to this system I think that would be really awesome but what we've got here with that Arc a730 M I think it's a great 1080p machine and Intel has been doing a really good job with their driver updates and increasing performance on these Arc gpus but that's going to wrap it up for this video wanted to take another look at this one I do think it's kind of underrated it's an awesome performer and you know if you're interested in learning a little more I will leave some links down below if there's anything else you want to see running on this PC let me know in the comments and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today I wanted to take a look at one of the most underrated mini gaming PCs on the market right now this thing is capable of playing newer AAA games at 1080P and we can even run some older stuff at 1440 over 60 FPS and that's because this tiny PC actually has a dedicated Ark GPU it's a pretty powerful little unit because it's the Intel Arc a730 M and given that Intel has put out so many updates for their Ark gpus and inreasing the performance across the board I figured it was time to take another look at this unit now there's a lot of other interesting things going on with this Mini PC and this is known as the mines Forum hn 2673 it's got one of the best cooling systems that I've seen in these gaming mini PCS because over here on the Le hand side it's got a cooler for that Intel Arc a730 M and it's got a cooler for the CPU so they're both over here we've got four fans and when it comes to that GPU It's actually an mxm form factor as you can see without the stand on it's actually a really small form factor PC I personally like setting it up vertically but you could lay it on the desk horizontally if you want to and over on this side it's got a bracketing system with all the cabling we need to add two 2.5 in hard drives or ssds so it can add a sufficient amount of storage to this thing also now moving over to the other side really easy to get in here but uh upgrading the SSD is a bit of a chore now it's not totally impossible you just have to remove a couple of these fans but as you can see we've got four fans here sitting on top of minus forms neat cooling system for this Mini PC so over on the Le hand side here's our CPU Cooler we've got an i7 CPU I'll go over the full specs in a second and if you take a look at the right hand side this is the cooler for that Ark a730 M now the m stands for mobile but the way this is set up is mxm it actually slots in here and if you're not familiar with the mxm form factor it stands for mobile PCI E Express module and we've actually seen this in some really high-end laptops so you could replace that GPU the one on screen right now isn't exactly the a730 but it's very similar so they do need to add their own cooling solution to this but it just slots right into the motherboard and in theory you could upgrade the GPU in here if you could find a more powerful mxm GPU so with this Mini PC we've got a dedicated graphics card and when it comes to the overall specs for the CPU this is powered by the Intel i7 12 650h 10 cores 16 threads six performance cores up to 4.7 GHz and four efficiency course up to 3.5 we can do up to 64 GB of ddr4 at 3200 megat transfers per second running in dual Channel with this Mini PC and of course instead of using the built-in UHD igpu we're going to be utilizing the Intel Arc a730 has 24 XE cores 24 Ray tracing units and the core clock in this can actually boost up to 250 mahz the way I've got this one configured is 16 GB of RAM a 1 TB m. 2 drive and we're going to be running Windows 11 Pro on this thing now I'll tell you what when these Intel arc graphics cards were released they weren't putting out great performance I mean they could definitely play games but over time with their driver optimizations just for instance here's a change log for their latest driver Assassin's Creed Syndicate up to 65% average FPS at 1080p with medium settings we're constantly getting new updates from Intel for these Arc gpus and they really do have a lot to gain from their driver as opposed to the other two big GPU manufacturers on the market right now those are really fleshed out with this definitely newer technology and these drivers are really helping in the performance area all right so I've got everything updated got a bunch of stuff installed that we're going to be testing out and one of the main things you need to keep in mind with these uh Intel Arc gpus is the driver update you just need to make sure you're up to date they've been releasing a ton of new updates fixing lots of problems increasing performance dramatically across the board as you can see we've got that core i72 650h 16 gigs of ddr4 at 3200 MHz we've got access to the UHD Graphics here with that 12 650h but we're not going to rely on those we've got that Arc a 730m 6 gigs of vam and I will show you TDP and everything like that but we've also got access to the art control center now with the desktop variance of these Arc gpus from performance we usually have some set that we can mess around with like upping that TDP with this it's kind of right out of the box because it is a mobile variant but it's in that mxm form factor we've also got our game launcher from here we can customize each one of these games from our frame delivery postprocessing 3D overrides right now I've got mine set up as uh global settings so everything we're going to be testing we'll use those global settings from the art control panel not much that I've tweaked and tuned from here but again keep these drivers updated because they can really really up that FPS I also wanted to give you a look at just TDP out of the box with the CPU and GPU here uh so from CPU I'm just going to run a quick stress test right here you'll see jump up to around 80 Watts which is really good for this chip I mean we can hit those boost clocks we need and of course when it comes to that GPU The Arc a 730m we're just going to put a massive load on this thing our maximum clock here is 2, 50 MHz and this runs it up to around 90 Watts now that's at full boat this is kind of an extreme test here but I just wanted to give you an idea of what kind of power this thing's going to be pulling and remember this GPU power is not split up between the CPU and GPU this is a dedicated GPU in this Mini PC next thing I wanted to take a look at were some GPU benchmarks and the first one we have here is the open CL Benchmark in geekbench 6 we got a total score of 73,5 and if we go down their list they do have a geekbench opencl browser over on their website and this is coming in just a bit ahead of the RTX 450 laptop variant and of course I mean we've got a mobile variant here just in a desktop PC so this Ark a730 is looking pretty competitive when it comes to 1080p gaming next up we've got 3D Mark night raid with a 48,8 79 fire strike coming in with a pretty impressive 16,9 44 and finally time by with an 8,957 graphic score up at the top 8,830 so yeah just judging by these synthetic benchmark scores we should be able to get some 1080p AAA gaming out of the way on this and you know with a little bit of room to spare like I mentioned at the beginning you could definitely do newer games at 1080 and if you wanted to go through your backlog older stuff like Skyrim 1440 High maxed out over 60 FPS but the first game we have here is Hell divers 2 1080p High settings we got an average of 65 I was actually expecting to see a little more but uh you know when it comes to those Arc drivers there could be an update next week that definitely UPS this performance either way I mean at 1080 High settings looking really good here it's definitely playable I also tested shadow of the Tomb Raider just using that built-in Benchmark High settings 1080 we had an average of 68 FPS Mortal Kombat 1 1080 high and we're not using any kind of resolution scale we could always go with Intel XC SS but we're at a true 1080p here High settings looking really good and you might see some screen tearing that's my game capture wasn't synced up correctly with the correct refresh rate of my monitor no screen tearing while I was playing the game on the monitor itself but we're getting a constant 60D across the board fighting games on this are going to work great at 1080p Ratchet and Clank Rift apart is one of those I've always had issues with on lower-end gpus be it IG gpus or dedicated gpus here uh not too bad by the end we had an average of 72 FPS and you can see we get much higher every once in a while 1080p High settings no resolution scale Spider-Man Miles Morales 1080p High by the end average of 77 FPS and with all of this stuff just turning vsync on trying to lock it down at 60 you're going to have a really nice experience with this Mini PC I also tested out Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 using the built-in benchmarks we're at 1080 with the balanced preset I've also got xcss set to balance with this Benchmark we had an average of 92 FPS and a low of 72 so we're well over that threshold this is another one of those really playable games and the final game I wanted to test out here was cyberpunk 2077 I was really surprised by the performance here given that we're using an arc GPU we've definitely had some issues with uh drivers in this game here but at 1080p high with XCS set to balance we had an average of 81 FPS so yeah I mean with all of these driver Updates this little PC with that Ark a730 m is doing a really good job at 1080p now the last thing I wanted to take a look at was just total system power consumption like I showed you when we got into Windows this CPU will boost up to 80 Watts the GPU boost up to 90 and those are extreme use case scenarios at idle from the wall using a kilowatt meter this is pulling around 26 Watts average 1080p gaming jumps up to 152 and the maximum that I could get this to pull in an extreme test maxing out the CPU and GPU at the same time 237 Watts so significantly more than a smaller PC with just an igpu but we are seeing some but we are seeing much better performance at of something something like this when you compare it overall I do think that this is a really awesome concept given that we've got that mxm GPU now if we could get our hands on more powerful mxm gpus and replace it in here that would be really cool and I was really hoping that minus form was going to come out with a line of mini PCS and mxm gpus that we could kind of pick and choose what we want to add to this system I think that would be really awesome but what we've got here with that Arc a730 M I think it's a great 1080p machine and Intel has been doing a really good job with their driver updates and increasing performance on these Arc gpus but that's going to wrap it up for this video wanted to take another look at this one I do think it's kind of underrated it's an awesome performer and you know if you're interested in learning a little more I will leave some links down below if there's anything else you want to see running on this PC let me know in the comments and like always thanks for watching\n"
