ATI Radeon HD Refresh: The 3650 and 3450 Arrive

In comparison to many other graphics cards on the market currently, the Radon HD 3650 is quite small.  The PCB itself extends barely .5” from the rear of a PCI Express expansion slot and it is no higher than its retention plate.   It’s clear just by looking at the card, however, that this is an ATI-built graphics card.

    


    


    
The Radeon HD 3650 Exposed

As you can see, the Radeon HD 3650 has a small, single-slot active cooler and Ruby is confident that her antiperspirant is doing its job.  The board features a pair of CrossFire edge connectors along the top edge of its PCB, and dual, dual-link DVI outputs along with a single HDTV / S-Video output.  We should also note that the Radeon 3650 supports audio over HDMI as well using a supplied adapter.

If we pull off the cooler, the diminutive RV635 GPU is visible.  The die is tiny by today’s standards at about 12mm x 11mm, which is a fraction the size of a U.S. dime.  AMD should be able to churn these out by the truckload.

The Radeon HD 3650 features 120 stream processors, 8 texture units, 4 ROPs, and a 128-bit interface to its on-board frame buffer.  If you look at the full list of specifications above, you’ll notice memory clock speed has multiple entries though.  That’s because there is more than one Radeon HD 3650 launching today.  The card we tested, and what you see pictured above, is a 256MB model with 1.6GHz GDDR3 memory and a 725MHz GPU.  DDR2-equipped Radeon HD 3650’s with varying amounts of on-board memory ranging from 256MB to 1GB, however, are also being introduced, with lower memory clock speeds but the same GPU speed.

As we mentioned in our introduction, the Radeon 3400 series of cards is launching today as well.  The Radeon HD 3450 and 3470 feature 40 stream processors, 4 texture units, 4 ROPs, and UVD.  Memory and GPU frequencies and the output port configuration will vary from card to card.

     
The Radeon HD 3400 Family of Cards

Half and full-height Radeon HD 3400 series cards will be available almost immediately.  A version with a passive cooling solution is also planned.  Finally, we should point out that the Radeon HD 3600 and 3400 series of cards are the first to feature two integrated DisplayPort outputs, although not every board will feature the necessary connector.