ATI Radeon HD Refresh: The 3650 and 3450 Arrive

Performance Summary: Considering its sub-$100 projected price point, the Radeon HD 3650 performed well throughout testing.  The previous generation Radeon HD 2600 XT is available for about $110 to $170 on-line depending on its memory configuration.  Despite having a lower price and consuming less power, the new Radeon HD 3650 was able to outpace the 2600 XT in a couple of benchmarks (HL2: EP2 and Crysis), and where the 2600 XT pulled ahead it wasn’t by a significant margin.  Video playback performance also proved to be a strong point for the Radeon HD 3650.

It’s clear to us that AMD is out to produce a solid line-up of graphics cards at a number of price points, that also happen to be economical to manufacture.  The new Radeon HD 3600 series doesn’t tear through any gaming benchmarks, but it does have a very complete feature set (DirectX 10.1, UVD, DisplayPort, CrossFireX), a low price, and it sips power in comparison to most of the other graphics cards currently on the market.

The bottom line is if you’re looking for a relatively inexpensive upgrade from integrated graphics or want an affordable graphics card for casual gaming that excels at video playback quality and CPU offload performance, the Radeon HD 3650 is a fine choice.  And although we didn’t have a chance to test the new 3400 series for this article, we suspect they too will be strong products at their respective price points.