Earlier today it was reported that the Intel Arc A-Series of mobile GPUs are to be made available exclusively to the South Korean market. And this is where we can find the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro laptop with the option of being fitted with the Arc A350M graphics.
Some of us had been thinking for quite some time that there is some misinformation regarding this news. However, it turns out that many reviewers in fact did manage to get their hands on these laptops and hence became the first ones in the world to try out the Arc GPU.
A tech reviewer named bullslab from the Jeoljit Research Institute has tested this Samsung laptop with product code NT950XEV-G51A. This model comes with a Core i5-1240P Alder Lake 12-core and a 16-thread CPU. With a LPDDR5 RAM of 16 GB, it features a 1080p 60Hz AMOLED display and is only 1.17 kg heavy. It comes equipped with the Arc A350M mobile GPU with a RAM of 4 GB.
The reviewer has commented that the whole process to update drivers might not be so straightforward and would confuse the first time users. This holds true for the GPU drivers in particular which have an entirely separate branch for the Arc GPUs. There is a more recent branch for integrated GPUs (30.0.101.1660) but for the Arc GPUs the drivers seem to be older (30.0.101.132). What is worse is that the Intel graphics card panel doesn’t show the name of the GPU and instead only shows “Unknown 5694”.
The one good thing appears to be the speed; the 3D Mark test reveals that the Arc 350M is faster than the NVIDIA GeForce MX450 with a TDP of 25W. However, it is still slower than the GTX 1650. To be fair, we aren’t talking of the lowest Max-Q variant though. It would be a fair comparison to put it up against the 35W Max-Q version here.
Finally, coming to the gaming tests, the reviewer has noticed that the GPU usage remained low through the games and the GPU clock wasn’t stable. This case is predominantly visible while testing PUBG which had a lot of stutters. However, games that normally would require a low GPU usage such as the League of Legends, don’t affect the performance much and maintain a good framerate.
Via VideoCardz