I got a desktop A770 some time ago, when its price was very hard to resist and I needed to replace the dGPU in my 24x7 workstation, that sees some occasional gaming but mostly is designed to run at low power, yet decent peak.
My main issue at the time was that it just wouldn't work with my (DP) KVM, the only way to get a video output was a direct connect on HDMI, even direct DP would only sometimes appear once Windows was fully booted.
So I returned it and got an RTX 4070 dual slot and dual fan from PNY instead, because the case is also quite cramped with a RAID6 HDD array, a SATA SSD array and other stuff: plenty of cables and the ARC A770 was nicely compact.
Idle power would have been a real issue, if it hadn't failed the first round already.
I got a little weak again some months later, when the Serpent Canyon NUC12 fell below €700, because that got you both an AD i7-12700H and a 16GB A700(mobile) very near the price of such a NUC without the dGPU.
At that price I felt I couldn't really go wrong, because I could always use it my many other NUCs, which server as µ-servers: the 16GB ARC770 dGPU option was for free!
I also have a Phantom Lake NUC11 with an RTX 2060m in it, which was also dirt cheap (€450) by the time I got it, basically also the same price as a NUC without a dGPU and that machine turned out to be quite good for THD gaming while being very quiet.
That's where the NUC12 can't quite match the NUC11 as it uses twice the amount of power in gaming and needs to spin its fans to cool that off.
But in terms of gaming performance it seemd to do rather well at 3k, sometimes even exceeding 60FPS.
ARC Survival Evolved has been a terrible game for my dGPUs, but the one I loved to play most with my kids. On my 42" 4k main screen only an RTX 4090 was finally able to get me to near 60FPs. It's based on a rather old Unreal 4 release and only pure rasterizing super powers will get you the eye candy and responsiveness I love so much.
And on the NUC12's A770m it was surprising good as well, at 1440p, obviously, not 4k.
But with the new release, ARC Survival Ascend, that changed dramatically. Based on Unreal 5 it can take advantage of DLSS 3.5 on the RTX 4090 so that stays pretty much the same performance (but mich nicer graphics) than the "Evolved" variant.
But on the A770 it just bombs, even with 1080p and "medium" graphics it is barely playable. There is no XeSS support yet and if you need to rely on rasterization power alone, Unreal 5 has upped the ante far beyond what that dGPU can do.
Of course, mine is the mobile variant, but I'd estimate the regression versus the full power desktop at perhaps only 30%.
I'm afraid that DLSS and Unreal are pushing the state of the art upwards much faster than Intel can optimize and push XeSS and their drivers.
But since I got it "for free", I'm not complaining.
As a better console I'd still recommend it to those who are not afraid to manage a PC.
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