First Intel Arc A730M Powered Laptop Goes on Sale, in China

The first benchmark result of an Intel Arc A730M laptop made an appearance online and the mysterious laptop used to run 3DMark turned out to be from a Chinese company called Machenike. The laptop itself appears to go under the name of Dawn16 Discovery Edition and features a 16-inch display with a native resolution of 2560 x 1600, with a 165 Hz refresh rate. CPU wise, Machenike went with a Core i7-12700H, which is a 6+8 core CPU with 20 threads, where the performance cores top out at 4.7 GHz. The CPU has been paired with 16 GB of 4800 MHz DDR5 memory and the system also has a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD of some kind, with a max read speed of 3500 MB/s, which isn’t particularly impressive. Other features include Thunderbolt 4 support, WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, as well as an 80 Whr battery pack.

However, none of the above is particularly unique and what matters here is of course the Intel Arc A730M GPU. It has been paired with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 192-bit interface, at 14 Gbps according to the specs. The memory bandwidth is said to be 336 GB/s. The company also provided a couple of performance metrics, with a 3DMark TimeSpy figure of 10002 points and a 3DMark Fire Strike figure of 23090 points. The TimeSpy score is a few points slower than the numbers posted earlier, but helps verify the earlier test result. Other interesting nuggets of information include support for 8k60 12-bit HDR video decoding for AV1, HEVC, AVC and VP9, as well as 8k 10-bit HDR encoding for said formats. Here a figure for the Puget Benchmark in what appears to be Photoshop (PS) is provided, where it scores 1188 points. The laptop is up for what appears to be pre-order, with a price tag of 7,499 RMB, or about US$1,130.