The A310: A Decent but Not Top-Notch GPU for Small Form Factor PCs

We're currently testing the NVIDIA GeForce A310, a low-profile single-slot GPU that's designed to fit small form factor PCs. With its 5GB of GDDR6 memory, we're digging into system memory and seeing how it performs in various games.

As expected, the A310 doesn't exactly light up the performance charts, but it's still capable of playing some popular titles at decent frame rates. We started with Doom Eternal, a game that's relatively easy to run on most systems. At 1080p medium with 100% resolution scale and 60 FPS as our target, we were able to achieve an average of 74 FPS by the end of this run. While it may not be a record-breaking performance, it's still playable and shows that the A310 can handle some of the more modern games.

Next up, we tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider using the built-in Benchmark tool at 1080p medium with XCS set to Performance. Unfortunately, we didn't quite reach our target frame rate, with an average of only 63 FPS by the end of this run. While it's still above 60 FPS, it falls short of what we might expect from a GPU with this level of performance.

In contrast, GTA V performed much better than expected, with an average of 134 FPS at 1080 High and XC SS set to Balance. This suggests that the A310 can handle some of the more demanding titles in the game's library, although it may not be able to keep up with the highest settings at all times.

Mortal Kombat 1 was another title that we tested, this time at medium 1080p XC SS and without XC SS on. Without XC SS, we were able to achieve an average of around 42 FPS, but with XC SS enabled, we saw a significant improvement in performance, dropping down to 61 FPS at the lower resolution.

We also tested some fighting games that are more suited to the A310's capabilities, including Street Fighter VI and Tekken 7. In both cases, we were able to achieve smooth performance at 900p low with XC SS set to Balance, although we had to drop the resolution down to 900p from our target setting of 1080p.

Finally, we tested Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080 Low with XS set to Performance and 900p Low with XE SS set to Balance. Without XS enabled, we were able to achieve an average of around 61 FPS, but with XS enabled, we saw a significant improvement in performance, dropping down to 71 FPS.

Given its relatively low power consumption and price point of $99, the A310 is a good option for those looking for a low-profile single-slot GPU that can play some modern games at decent frame rates. However, it's not without its limitations, and we may see better performance with more demanding titles or when paired with a system that has more power to spare.

One thing to note is that the A310's cooling solution is a low-profile single slot cooler, which is available for purchase separately. While it's out of our budget at present, we may be able to upgrade in the future and see an improvement in performance as a result.

For now, the A310 remains a decent option for those looking for a low-power GPU that can play some modern games at 1080p or lower resolutions. We'll continue to test it in future videos and explore its capabilities further.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again it's been a little while since we've seen a single slot lowprofile GPU hit the mark in but today we're going to be taking a look at a brand new one this is the sparkle Eco Arc A310 and it's a low power single slot low profile card and you know when it comes to these low profiles we've only got a couple of choices you know if you want to do a little bit of gaming the gt1030 which is definitely getting dated and the radon RX 6400 so I'm actually really glad to get my hands on a new lowprofile single slot card so obviously what we've got here for super small form factor now you could definitely add this to a larger PC if you wanted to doesn't require any extra power total board power here for the overall GPU itself 50 Watts but while you're running at the stock clocks this thing's only going to pull about 32 watts like most of these single slots we've got 4 GB of vram here and it's based on Intel Arc it's the A310 we do have a little bit of tweaking and tuning tun in that we can do from the Intel art Control Center and I'll show you that once we get into it and when it comes to outputting video from this card we've got HDMI and two mini display ports so they wanted to keep this really small but we've got three displays out of the A310 here not too bad it is PCI e8x 4.0 and the other specs are as followed over on the sparkle website it states that the GPU clock is 1,00 MHz but this boost way over it's actually double what we're looking at here and we'll get into Windows I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about this has six XE cores six Ray tracing units 96 Intel xmx engines and 96 XE Vector engines we've also got 4 GB of gddr6 again it's pcie 4.0 8X and total board power is 50 wats but when you're running this you're only going to see a power draw of around 32 to 34 at the stock power limit so I've recently been on the hunt for a single slot lowprofile card specifically for this ms01 from Min Forum I love this little workstation PC and as soon as I open it up you'll see we do have a PCI ex16 slot really only enough room for a single slot lowprofile card and this A310 fits right in here perfectly now when they initially announced the ms01 they did show off a video with an A2000 but it was a modified A2000 from Nvidia with an aftermarket single slot cooler I'm in the market for one of those I'd love to put that card in here but until then I was looking for something to kind of get me by and the sparkle Eco A310 is only coming in at around $99 fits perfectly in this little setup and I know the CPU here we've got more than enough power I've got the 13th gen I9 version of the ms01 and I'm really hoping to see some decent gaming performance now I personally have not tested the A310 I've tested most of the other art cards on the market right now this is coming in as one of their lower-end versions but at $99 if you're in a pinch for a small form factor low profile single slot card it might work out all right so first things first we've got this card in the super small form factor ms01 from minus Forum there are a couple different variants but this one here happens to have the Intel I9 13900 H I've got 32 gigs of ddr5 running at 5200 MHz and of course we're going to be using this Intel Arc A310 low profile only 4 gigs of vram and what I've noticed here is with a lot of these games it is digging in into the system memory which will hurt performance cuz a lot of these newer games do need more than 4 gigs of VR fully up to date here uh with the Intel Arc drivers and luckily since we've got a desktop variant we can actually do a little bit of tuning here so basically what you're really going to want to do with this little card here is just give it a little more I've been messing around with the settings GPU performance boost I've just gone up to 50 and I've taken the GPU voltage offset up just a little bit to help out that performance performance boost now you really will have to kind of experiment with this because all cards are going to be different all systems are going to be different there's a chance you could go a bit higher with this with no GPU voltage offset but uh you really got to kind of just mess around with it see what's stable what's not but luckily we do have this option here to get a little more out of the A310 I'm going to run furmark this is going to stress that GPU out for us and as you can see right here our GPU clock is at 2,350 MHz so that's well over the advertised 1,000 MHz and even without changing the settings in art control panel it still boost up to 2350 and really we're up to 38.4 because we've done a little bit of that offset little bit of performance boost this is normally around 32 watts just across the board if you're not using any kind of tweaking or tuning with this card itself so yeah there is a little more that we can get out of this and the first thing I wanted to show off were some benchmarks that I ran on this system 3D Mark night raid 7,44 and this one here isn't looking as good as I thought it would be I mean it's kind of right on par with the 780m igpu but moving over to fire strike started to look a little better coming in with an 8,037 still pretty low in terms of running this Benchmark on a dedicated GPU in 2024 but it's a really cheap lowprofile single slot GPU and the final Benchmark we have here is time spy with a 3,722 was hoping to see a little better performance in these synthetic benchmarks but that's what they are they're synthetic now it's time to move over to some real world gaming and see how this A310 really performs first one on the list is Forza Horizon 5 and that's because it's definitely an easier game to run on these lower-end gpus we're at 1080p medium with no XC SS now we could also add FSR if you wanted to or go with Intel's X SS we didn't need any scaling here at medium 1080P and if you take a look at After Burner up up in the top left hand corner you can see that GPU memory is at 5 gigs we are digging into system memory right now remember this A310 only has 4 gigs of gddr6 next up we've got Doom Eternal really great performance medium 1080p 100% resolution scale definitely over 60 we had an average of 74 FPS by the end of this run here I mean it's really playable but again this is a little bit of an older one and one that's pretty easy to run on these systems so I expected we'd see some playable performance here definitely is I also wanted to test shadow of the Tomb Raider so I just used the built-in Benchmark here 1080p medium and I do have XCS set to Performance this didn't Faire as well as I thought it would because uh by the end of this run we only had an average of 63 now we are over that 60 hump but it would have been nice to be up in the 70s or 80s with a little card like this GTA 5 is one that I still go back to for single player I did some multiplayer for a while but I wanted to test it here and at 1080 High we had an average of 134 FPS looking like these older games are going to run really well on the A310 so I mean we've got a lot of games that are going to be totally playable on this card and given $99 price tag for a new card that'll fit these small form factor PCS looking pretty decent so far not top the line by any means but Mortal Kombat 1 did much better than I thought it would medium 1080p XC SS is set to balance now without XC SS on this is around 42 FPS with just the medium 1080p so having that resolution scale really helps out with this but the fighting games that I've tested so far do work well on the ark A310 po world was one that I didn't think was going to perform that well now unfortunately we don't have access to FSR or xss yet in the game without any modifications so I did have to drop this down to 900p low we got an average of 61 FPS and you will see it drop down below 60 but for the most part I mean we're over that hump there and it's not too bad if you're in a pinch you could definitely get by but we've still got some resolution we could take down you could always go down to 720 on a card like this and the final game I wanted to test was cyberpunk 277 so at 1080 low with XS set to Performance you can get an average of around 61 I wanted a little more out of it so I went down to 900p low with XE SS set to balance and we got an average of 71 FPS given the state of Arc and this game here I think this is some pretty decent performance given that we're working with a low powerered Intel GPU and Intel is constantly updating these drivers so uh just a couple weeks ago I can guarantee you that the A310 was not performing like it is here in cyberpunk 2077 but with those later Arc drivers or those newer Arc drivers we're seeing playable performance at 900p going into this with the sparkle A310 I knew we weren't going to see 4K performance out of this card and that's not what I was going for it's a $99 lowprofile single slot card that can play some games pretty decently at 1080 some of the newer stuff you might want to drop down to 900p but given the limited availability of the single Slot lowprofile Cards for a small form factor PC like the ms01 this could be a good choice to get by until you can find something El now one thing I mentioned at the beginning a lowprofile single slot cooler for the A2000 and they're out there but uh the price on them is pretty high a little hard to get soon as I can get one I will be putting one inside of this PC here but for now I think I could stick to the A310 and have a pretty decent time with the ms01 but that's going to wrap it up for this video I will have at least one more coming up with the ark A310 I do think we can get a little more out of this when we pair it up with a different kind of system and I'll talk about more of that in the next video but if you're interested in learning a little more I will leave some links down below you can pick this up over on Amazon I believe New Egg also has it and if you want to see anything else in the next video with this graphics card let me know in the comments below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again it's been a little while since we've seen a single slot lowprofile GPU hit the mark in but today we're going to be taking a look at a brand new one this is the sparkle Eco Arc A310 and it's a low power single slot low profile card and you know when it comes to these low profiles we've only got a couple of choices you know if you want to do a little bit of gaming the gt1030 which is definitely getting dated and the radon RX 6400 so I'm actually really glad to get my hands on a new lowprofile single slot card so obviously what we've got here for super small form factor now you could definitely add this to a larger PC if you wanted to doesn't require any extra power total board power here for the overall GPU itself 50 Watts but while you're running at the stock clocks this thing's only going to pull about 32 watts like most of these single slots we've got 4 GB of vram here and it's based on Intel Arc it's the A310 we do have a little bit of tweaking and tuning tun in that we can do from the Intel art Control Center and I'll show you that once we get into it and when it comes to outputting video from this card we've got HDMI and two mini display ports so they wanted to keep this really small but we've got three displays out of the A310 here not too bad it is PCI e8x 4.0 and the other specs are as followed over on the sparkle website it states that the GPU clock is 1,00 MHz but this boost way over it's actually double what we're looking at here and we'll get into Windows I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about this has six XE cores six Ray tracing units 96 Intel xmx engines and 96 XE Vector engines we've also got 4 GB of gddr6 again it's pcie 4.0 8X and total board power is 50 wats but when you're running this you're only going to see a power draw of around 32 to 34 at the stock power limit so I've recently been on the hunt for a single slot lowprofile card specifically for this ms01 from Min Forum I love this little workstation PC and as soon as I open it up you'll see we do have a PCI ex16 slot really only enough room for a single slot lowprofile card and this A310 fits right in here perfectly now when they initially announced the ms01 they did show off a video with an A2000 but it was a modified A2000 from Nvidia with an aftermarket single slot cooler I'm in the market for one of those I'd love to put that card in here but until then I was looking for something to kind of get me by and the sparkle Eco A310 is only coming in at around $99 fits perfectly in this little setup and I know the CPU here we've got more than enough power I've got the 13th gen I9 version of the ms01 and I'm really hoping to see some decent gaming performance now I personally have not tested the A310 I've tested most of the other art cards on the market right now this is coming in as one of their lower-end versions but at $99 if you're in a pinch for a small form factor low profile single slot card it might work out all right so first things first we've got this card in the super small form factor ms01 from minus Forum there are a couple different variants but this one here happens to have the Intel I9 13900 H I've got 32 gigs of ddr5 running at 5200 MHz and of course we're going to be using this Intel Arc A310 low profile only 4 gigs of vram and what I've noticed here is with a lot of these games it is digging in into the system memory which will hurt performance cuz a lot of these newer games do need more than 4 gigs of VR fully up to date here uh with the Intel Arc drivers and luckily since we've got a desktop variant we can actually do a little bit of tuning here so basically what you're really going to want to do with this little card here is just give it a little more I've been messing around with the settings GPU performance boost I've just gone up to 50 and I've taken the GPU voltage offset up just a little bit to help out that performance performance boost now you really will have to kind of experiment with this because all cards are going to be different all systems are going to be different there's a chance you could go a bit higher with this with no GPU voltage offset but uh you really got to kind of just mess around with it see what's stable what's not but luckily we do have this option here to get a little more out of the A310 I'm going to run furmark this is going to stress that GPU out for us and as you can see right here our GPU clock is at 2,350 MHz so that's well over the advertised 1,000 MHz and even without changing the settings in art control panel it still boost up to 2350 and really we're up to 38.4 because we've done a little bit of that offset little bit of performance boost this is normally around 32 watts just across the board if you're not using any kind of tweaking or tuning with this card itself so yeah there is a little more that we can get out of this and the first thing I wanted to show off were some benchmarks that I ran on this system 3D Mark night raid 7,44 and this one here isn't looking as good as I thought it would be I mean it's kind of right on par with the 780m igpu but moving over to fire strike started to look a little better coming in with an 8,037 still pretty low in terms of running this Benchmark on a dedicated GPU in 2024 but it's a really cheap lowprofile single slot GPU and the final Benchmark we have here is time spy with a 3,722 was hoping to see a little better performance in these synthetic benchmarks but that's what they are they're synthetic now it's time to move over to some real world gaming and see how this A310 really performs first one on the list is Forza Horizon 5 and that's because it's definitely an easier game to run on these lower-end gpus we're at 1080p medium with no XC SS now we could also add FSR if you wanted to or go with Intel's X SS we didn't need any scaling here at medium 1080P and if you take a look at After Burner up up in the top left hand corner you can see that GPU memory is at 5 gigs we are digging into system memory right now remember this A310 only has 4 gigs of gddr6 next up we've got Doom Eternal really great performance medium 1080p 100% resolution scale definitely over 60 we had an average of 74 FPS by the end of this run here I mean it's really playable but again this is a little bit of an older one and one that's pretty easy to run on these systems so I expected we'd see some playable performance here definitely is I also wanted to test shadow of the Tomb Raider so I just used the built-in Benchmark here 1080p medium and I do have XCS set to Performance this didn't Faire as well as I thought it would because uh by the end of this run we only had an average of 63 now we are over that 60 hump but it would have been nice to be up in the 70s or 80s with a little card like this GTA 5 is one that I still go back to for single player I did some multiplayer for a while but I wanted to test it here and at 1080 High we had an average of 134 FPS looking like these older games are going to run really well on the A310 so I mean we've got a lot of games that are going to be totally playable on this card and given $99 price tag for a new card that'll fit these small form factor PCS looking pretty decent so far not top the line by any means but Mortal Kombat 1 did much better than I thought it would medium 1080p XC SS is set to balance now without XC SS on this is around 42 FPS with just the medium 1080p so having that resolution scale really helps out with this but the fighting games that I've tested so far do work well on the ark A310 po world was one that I didn't think was going to perform that well now unfortunately we don't have access to FSR or xss yet in the game without any modifications so I did have to drop this down to 900p low we got an average of 61 FPS and you will see it drop down below 60 but for the most part I mean we're over that hump there and it's not too bad if you're in a pinch you could definitely get by but we've still got some resolution we could take down you could always go down to 720 on a card like this and the final game I wanted to test was cyberpunk 277 so at 1080 low with XS set to Performance you can get an average of around 61 I wanted a little more out of it so I went down to 900p low with XE SS set to balance and we got an average of 71 FPS given the state of Arc and this game here I think this is some pretty decent performance given that we're working with a low powerered Intel GPU and Intel is constantly updating these drivers so uh just a couple weeks ago I can guarantee you that the A310 was not performing like it is here in cyberpunk 2077 but with those later Arc drivers or those newer Arc drivers we're seeing playable performance at 900p going into this with the sparkle A310 I knew we weren't going to see 4K performance out of this card and that's not what I was going for it's a $99 lowprofile single slot card that can play some games pretty decently at 1080 some of the newer stuff you might want to drop down to 900p but given the limited availability of the single Slot lowprofile Cards for a small form factor PC like the ms01 this could be a good choice to get by until you can find something El now one thing I mentioned at the beginning a lowprofile single slot cooler for the A2000 and they're out there but uh the price on them is pretty high a little hard to get soon as I can get one I will be putting one inside of this PC here but for now I think I could stick to the A310 and have a pretty decent time with the ms01 but that's going to wrap it up for this video I will have at least one more coming up with the ark A310 I do think we can get a little more out of this when we pair it up with a different kind of system and I'll talk about more of that in the next video but if you're interested in learning a little more I will leave some links down below you can pick this up over on Amazon I believe New Egg also has it and if you want to see anything else in the next video with this graphics card let me know in the comments below but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching\n"