ATI Radeon HD Refresh: The 3650 and 3450 Arrive

Name: ATI Radeon HD Refresh: The 3650 and 3450 Arrive - Page 10
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, January 23, 2008, 12:01 AM EDT

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.


Competitive Price DX 10.1 Support Low Power Great Video Performance Availability Relatively Quiet	Not as fast as the 2600 XT Multiple Cards with Same Name

Tags: ATI, Radeon, HD, Radeon HD, ATI Radeon, arrive, refresh, Ive, AR, and

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