Overclocked Radeon HD 3650 Showdown

Just last week, we posted an evaluation of a Radeon HD 3650 card by Diamond Multimedia, where said manufacturer decided to one-up ATI's reference specifications by raising the amount of on-board memory to a full one gigabyte.  The results, unfortunately, were not overly favorable as the memory happened to be of the inexpensive, low-speed DDR2 variety.

Today, however, we take a look at two more HD 3650s, one each from ASUS and HIS, where the emphasis was placed more on clock speeds than on memory buffer size.  While the default speeds set forth by ATI's reference specifications were listed as 725 MHz for the GPU core and 800 MHz for the memory, the two cards represented in this article are decidedly faster: 800 / 900 MHz for ASUS and 790 / 890MHz for HIS.  The 10 MHz variance is not the only thing that separates the two cards, however.  ASUS' EAH3650 TOP comes with the standard 256 MB frame buffer, whereas HIS doubles this to 512 MB on their Radeon HD 3650 IceQ Turbo.  One card has slightly higher speeds, the other has twice the memory - let's see who wins this showdown of overclocked Radeon HD 3650s.

Overclocked Radeon HD 3650 Showdown - ASUS vs. HIS
Marco Chiappetta

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com