Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB
The Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB Up Close
The Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB's accessory bundle included a host of components that help the end-user get the most out of their new purchase. There was a complete installation manual as well as a drivers CD to help with basic installation and setup. Sapphire also threw in some useful software, including a copy of PowerDVD 7 6-Channel and a PowerDVD Suite with a number of editing/authoring titles such as PowerProducer 4, PowerDirector 5 Express and Power2GO 5.5 to name a few. Lastly, a copy of FutureMark 3DMark06 is included so users can benchmark their new card.
The box also came with a DVI-to-VGA adapter as well as DVI-to-HDMI for connecting to an HD ready display. There was also a TV-Out S-Video adapter as well as an HD Component display adapter making the card extremely versatile with respect to external display support. Lastly, Sapphire included a CrossFire link for coupling with a second CrossFire capable graphics card.
The box also came with a DVI-to-VGA adapter as well as DVI-to-HDMI for connecting to an HD ready display. There was also a TV-Out S-Video adapter as well as an HD Component display adapter making the card extremely versatile with respect to external display support. Lastly, Sapphire included a CrossFire link for coupling with a second CrossFire capable graphics card.
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The card itself is rather straight forward, sporting a RV635 GPU and 512MB of GDDR3 memory. The card has the standard dual DVI output configuration with TV-out nestled between the two. The card is PCI Express 2.0 compliant while offering DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support as well. Another plus is ATI's Unified Video Decoder (UVD) which supports full Blu-Ray as well as HD-DVD decode up to 1080p.
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The GPU is clocked at a default speed of 800MHz, 75MHz higher than the reference model we reviewed at launch while the GDDR3 memory runs at 900MHz providing 28.8GB/s of bandwidth. Combine clock speeds with 120 Shader processors, 8 Texture Units and 4 ROPs, the card delivers a Pixel Fill Rate of 3.2 GPixels per second and a Texture Fill Rate of 6.4 GTexels per second. Overdrive is not currently supported in drivers with this model, so overclocking is out of the question without third party tools, however.
Sapphire backs the card with a standard cooling package that was extremely quiet in normal operation. In fact, while sitting idle, the fan would actually shut off while the GPU sat at a comfortable 30C (per GPU-Z), conserving power as much as possible. Under load, the fan noise was nominal, noticeable but not a distraction.
Sapphire backs the card with a standard cooling package that was extremely quiet in normal operation. In fact, while sitting idle, the fan would actually shut off while the GPU sat at a comfortable 30C (per GPU-Z), conserving power as much as possible. Under load, the fan noise was nominal, noticeable but not a distraction.
