Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3650 1GB

Performance Summary:

If their gamble was to increase the memory buffer in lieu of any speed tweaks, than we have to say that Diamond lost this bet.  Placing 1GB of 400MHz DDR2 memory on board the HD 3650 1GB model effectively dropped performance well below that of a rival card from Sapphire.  On the bright side, Diamond's card did manage to compete head-to-head with an 8600 GTS from Gigabyte, that sells for a $30 - $40 premium.

As a general rule, we here at HotHardware are always pleased to see a manufacturer go back to the drawing board and make a card "their own".  Whether that means overclocking speeds, customizing and optimizing the cooling solution, or adding some other additional features; it's all in the best interest of creating a buzz for their product, giving the end consumer something to consider in terms of differentiation their in their product line.

Diamond's Viper Radeon HD 3650 1GB has, of course, the 1GB memory buffer appended right there in the name of the product.  And, as we have seen, there definitely seems to be a trend with more and more memory placed on board graphics cards to help with caching textures at higher resolutions.  So, we should be pleased with this effort, but overall the performance of this version of Diamonds HD 3650 wound up disappointing us instead.  The addition of the extra 512MB of memory makes this card one of the highest priced cards based on the HD 3650 GPU, currently hovering just north of $100 U.S., yet the frame rates were consistently below a cheaper model from Sapphire - and sometimes by a heady amount.  While we've been usually positive towards Diamond's slate of recent products, we're choosing to steer clear of this one.