Sparkle Intel Arc A310 ELF, 4GB GDDR6, Single Fan, SA310E-4G

Only the inductor coil makes noise under load, and at some low speeds there is noise from some kind of fan.

This video card become as best choice for Plex or Jellyfin video transcoding including AV1.The manufacture fix the issue with bracket replacing.Now heat sink removal is not necessary.

It's not easy to find a low profile, single slot card which will fit some small, mini PCs. Apart from this offering from Intel, there's the AMD RX6400. LP. But that doesn't do hardware encoding. So, it was great to be able to get this card, not from Europe, but from the US! Apparently, Sparkle is not very interested in the European market. But the conversion was £1 for $1. That's a bummer.Getting it is one thing; installing it is another. As this card was supposed to be a Low Profile card, it seems silly that it was shipped out with a high profile bracket attached. The low profile bracket was in the box for you to DIY. Many have commented on the positioning of one of the screws blocked by the cooling fan's hood. This meant that you had to invalidate the warranty as you had to break the seal of one of the screws holding the hood in place, and peel the hood off to get at the bracket screw. All this seems most unnecessary, as 90% of people buying the card will probably want it as a low profile card. Seems you have clever engineers designing these things but clueless about marketing them.So how does it perform? I bought it mainly for encoding videos rather than for gaming. There are YT videos reviewing its gaming potential if you are interested. Without having the figures to hand, I noticed a noticeable speed improvement in video encoding. Shotcut recognised it and was able to use it. Hopefully, more software will do so as I start to use it in anger. All in, it's a nice little card.As for other issues, the fan noise is reasonable even at its maximum speed. Note that you need a mini DP cable if you want to pair it with a DP monitor.

Good card, but there's a bug in the firmware when running in a Linux host where there is no fan control, so it constantly revs from idle to about 30%, can make the noise a bit annoying depending how quiet your environment is

As other reviews have mentioned, this card seems to have a broken firmware/VBIOS which results in the fans constantly revving up and down, making a very annoying noise. I've experienced this on Windows 11 with the latest drivers as of February 2025. Nothing you can change in the Intel Graphics Software, including custom fan curves, seems to make any difference to this behaviour.I purchased this card for testing purposes with AV1 encoding so it's not a deal-breaker for me, but if I had it in a machine which was switched on all the time I would absolutely be returning it.

So I used this for my Plex server on Truenas Scale, and the fan is constantly revving, I took it out and updated it via Windows to the latest firmware and still, the fan noise persists. I decided to return it as the noise is too much when working next to the server.

One star deducted for its lack of Blu-ray and 4K hardware playback, aka it will not play a disk with Cyberlink Software. If this is not an issue for you then it's streaming of HD and UHD content on a older generation machine's is flawless. Comes with 2x mini DP out and one HDMI, I found the HDMI to be a bit temperamental.Ever wanted to get more mileage from am older generation i5 for some light gaming and streaming 1080p HD and 4K video? This has you covered 💯. Don't expect miracles, but I was impressed with it's performance at this price pointUse it for your plex server!Use it to stream your family HD and UHD videos.Use it to finally play Half-life 2 😉.Small/ slim profile allows it to fit into a slim PC. Comes attached with the larger bracket. Slimline case one is included but it's tricky to remove the top screw as the cover/ cooling mounting is obstructive.

The fan noise is horrendous. I purchased this to use in a small home server and there's no way to control the fan speed, so unfortunately I will have to return it as the fan noise is unacceptable. As it's such a small niche card there's no chance of doing a fan mod for it either.