Technologies

Intel Arc A750 LE Graphics Card Review: A Sub-$300 Speed Champ

But it doesn’t score quite as high on stability.

Intel came very (very) late to the party with its desktop graphics cards, so it’s not surprising that they feel like a bit of a work in progress compared to veterans like Nvidia and AMD.

From a price and specs perspective, the A750 competes with Nvidia’s budget GeForce RTX 3050, which also falls roughly into the $250 to $300 price band. Intel dropped the price from $300 to $250 in February, but the market doesn’t seem to have totally caught up with that yet.

Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition

$270 at Amazon

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Like

Good price for its performance
AV1 encoding support

Don’t Like

Experienced some instability
large for its performance class

The Arc line currently includes a sub-$150 8GB entry-level Arc A380 and upmarket A770, which comes in two flavors: an Intel Limited Edition, with 16GB VRAM, and one available through board partners such as ASRock and Acer. The latter cards have bulked-up specs, notably four additional Xe graphics cores and faster clock speeds. So for less memory-demanding 1080p gaming the 8GB A770 might provide a little lift over the A750 — but it may not be worth the extra cash, depending on what they’re going for at any moment.

I’m not convinced the 16GB version makes a lot of sense. If you need that much memory, say for video editing or 1440p-plus gaming, you’re going to want more powerful components.

Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition

	Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition
Memory	8GB GDDR6
Memory bandwidth (GBps)	512.0
Memory clock (GHz)	2.0
GPU clock (GHz, base/boost)	2.1/2.4
Memory data rate/Interface	16Gbps/256 bits
Render Slices/RT cores	4/28
Texture mapping units	224
Tensor Cores	448
Process	6nm
TGP/min PSU	225/600W
Max thermal (degrees)	194F/90C
Bus	PCIe 4.0×16
Size	2 slots; 11.1 inches long (282mm)
Connections	3 x DP 1.4, 1 x HDMI 2.0
Current list price	$249
Ship date	October, 2022

You can get surprisingly reasonable 1440p performance out of the A750, especially if you’re aggressive with XeSS (Xe SuperSampling), the company’s upscaling technology a la Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution.

Keep in mind that if you’re upgrading an old system you may not get claimed (or as tested) performance. And by «old» I mean pre-2020 or earlier than Intel’s 10th-gen and AMD’s Zen 3 desktop CPUs. That’s because best performance requires resizable BAR support, which lets the CPU store its game-related data in the GPU’s VRAM rather than system RAM so the GPU doesn’t have to traverse the system bus to retrieve it. But the same RBAR performance caveat applies to most recent GPUs.

Back view of the Intel Arc A750 Limited Edition sitting atop a swirling aqua and white background showing the dual fans — The A750 LE is a full-length card.

Lori Grunin/CNET

The visible design aspects are pretty typical for a GPU: two fans on one side, vents on top and bottom and out the end. It’s heavy for its class, but there’s a lot of metal and thick, sturdy plastic. You can add a waterblock, though I could only find a couple compatible ones, one of which costs as much as the card. And removing the backplate can potentially get ugly, since it’s glued rather than screwed on. (I didn’t disassemble mine, but TechPowerUp has a nice teardown of it.)

Close up of the end bracket of the A750 LE lying down against a swirling aqua and white surface showing 3 DisplayPort and one HDMI connector — The A750 takes up two slots.

Lori Grunin/CNET

Performance

I’ve compared the A750 to the RTX 3060, since the EVGA RTX 3050 I reviewed is no longer produced — the company left the business in September 2022. The Asus Dual RTX 3060 OC is more expensive by about $100, but isn’t always the faster card. And even where the A750 lags it, for 1080p gaming it doesn’t do so by much. The RTX 3060’s 12GB of VRAM helps when you bump up resolution or do graphics work, but the newer architecture of the A750 means it acquits itself better than the two-year-old 3060 on operations like ray tracing. And because it’s not an old entry GPU, it supports AV1 encoding (for better streaming performance), while other low-end — Nvidia and AMD’s entry- and midlevel GPUs are still based on last-gen architecture.

My biggest gripe about the A750’s performance, though, isn’t about frame rates, it’s about the driver and related software. Some conflict with my network card — an Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 — made my system report it as having failed in Event Viewer, despite all indications to the contrary. It was still operational, though. But I never would have seen those event reports had I not been trying to track down the cause of freezes/BSODs. Removing the card and uninstalling the driver restored stability. Could be correlation, not causation, but I haven’t seen a BSOD in a long time.

Intel also configures its Arc Control Utility’s default well below the card’s stated maximum power consumption — 190 watts vs. 228 watts — which makes sense. For one thing, I saw only about a 4% frame-rate increase bumping it to 215 watts. But it also runs hot once you start playing with the overclocking settings, easily hitting its 90C maximum (and slightly above), and definitely hot enough to start exhibiting display glitches.

Overclocking anything runs the risk of system instability, but Arc Control doesn’t make it easy (or less tedious) to iterate through the possibilities.

These kinds of issues are normal for early generations of GPU technologies, and Arc is just a baby, which makes it a hard call against veteran competitors. But if you want something fast for less than $300, the Arc A750 is an attractive proposition. Just keep in mind you may have to change some GPU diapers.

Relative performance of comparable GPUs

Shadow of the Tomb Raider gaming test (1080p)

Intel Arc A750 LE

111

Asus Dual RTX 3060 OC

120

Note:

Longer bars indicate better performance (FPS)

Custom PC	Microsoft Windows 11 Pro (22H2); 3.2GHz Intel Core i9-12900K; 32GB DDR5-4800; 2x Corsair MP600 Pro SSD; Corsair HX1200 80 Plus Platinum PSU, MSI MPG Z690 Force Wi-Fi motherboard, Corsair 4000D Airflow midtower case

Technologies

Google, Meta and Amazon Join Global Pact to Fight Rising Online Scams

The companies will share fraud intelligence and coordinate responses as AI makes scams faster, cheaper and harder to detect.

Modern online scams operate across multiple platforms, perhaps spanning social media, messaging apps, email and online marketplaces. Google, Meta and Amazon are among 11 tech, retail and payments companies that have signed a new agreement to combat online scams by sharing threat intelligence across platforms, Axios first reported Monday.

The initiative, called the Industry Accord Against Online Scams & Fraud, is designed to improve how companies detect and respond to fraud that spans multiple services. Participants say they will exchange signals, such as scam-linked accounts and fraudulent domains, and coordinate enforcement actions.

By sharing intelligence in near real time, companies hope to identify these scams earlier and stop them before they spread.

The effort reflects how modern scams operate. A victim might encounter a fake celebrity investment ad on social media, move to a messaging app where the scammer builds trust, then faces prompts to send money through a fraudulent website, payment app or crypto wallet — spanning multiple companies’ ecosystems.

Google said it now blocks hundreds of millions of scam-related results every day using AI, underscoring how both attackers and defenders are increasingly relying on the same technology. Meta removed more than 159 million scam ads in 2025 and is expanding AI tools to detect impersonation and warn users.

Online scams are growing rapidly, in part because generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry. AI can be used not only to produce realistic phishing emails but also to clone voices and deepfake videos that impersonate executives, public figures and even family members.

The agreement is voluntary and doesn’t create new legal obligations, but it comes after regulators’ increased pressure on tech platforms to address fraud more aggressively. The companies say they will begin building frameworks for reporting and intelligence-sharing, though it’s not yet clear how quickly those systems will be deployed or how effective they will be in practice.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, March 18

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 18.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I thought it was a fairly easy one, but read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Word before «card,» flood» or «photography»
Answer: FLASH

6A clue: Joust weapon
Answer: LANCE

7A clue: Brain, heart or lungs
Answer: ORGAN

8A clue: «Frozen» reindeer
Answer: SVEN

9A clue: What can be found on frozen roads or frozen margaritas
Answer: SALT

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Follow a dentist’s recommendation
Answer: FLOSS

2D clue: Baby bug
Answer: LARVA

3D clue: Shape made in the snow
Answer: ANGEL

4D clue: Very little
Answer: SCANT

5D clue: Egg layer
Answer: HEN

Technologies

Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options

The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.

Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.

The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.

For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: «3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below.»

Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.

Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas.

In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.

She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.

«I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,» Kapps said.

Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: «When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.»

Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon.

Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation

Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.

«It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,» said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. «It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.»

Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.

«There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,» she said. «This closes that gap.»

The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency.

«And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,» Carls said. «Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.»