Something to look forward to: Mechanike's A730M-equipped system is priced surprisingly well compared to other similarly-specced laptops. It'll launch in China later this month, with global availability still unknown. Early gaming benchmarks don't look too good, but Intel did mention it's still working on driver support.
Later this month, laptops equipped with Intel's new Arc A730M GPUs are expected to release in China. However, they might remain a region exclusive for a while, as the company recently blamed factory lockdowns and software issues for the limited availability of their lower-end Arc cards.
A leaker on Weibo just posted some benchmark scores of an A730M-equipped laptop, and the results look promising. In 3DMark Time Spy, the system got a graphics score of 10,107. This puts it very close to the RTX 3070 Laptop, which has an average score of 10,563 in this benchmark.
The reviewer also posted some gaming benchmarks, although it's clear from the frametime spikes that Intel's drivers still have a long way to go. They noted that Shadow of the Tomb Raider would simply crash on startup.
The test system was a Mechanike laptop that featured an Intel Core i7-12700H 14-core processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 16-inch WQHD screen with a 165 Hz refresh rate. The Chinese notebook manufacturer also published a slide containing the Fire Strike scores of the machine. At 23,090, the Arc card sits right between the RTX 3060 Laptop and RTX 3070 Laptop.
As a reminder, the A730M features 384 EUs, 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, and a TGP ranging from 80-120W. There's an even higher-end GPU in Intel's mobile Arc lineup, the A770M, coming with 512 EUs, 16 GB of VRAM, and a TGP reaching up to 150W.
The Mechanike Dawn 16 laptop is currently listed for CNY 8,499 ($1,274), making it one of the cheapest notebooks equipped with a 12700H. We also recently got a peek at a desktop Arc graphics card at a gaming event in Texas. Unfortunately, the release date of Intel's desktop cards is unknown.