ATI recently released a few lower end cards. One of these new cards is the Radeon HD 3650 which is based upon the new RV635 chipset. The RV635 uses fewer transistors than the RV630 chip, which itself featured a pretty massive 390 million of the little blighters. In fact AMD has made some optimisations during the die shrink, which should help to improve performance per clock and efficiency a little bit. The Radeon HD 3650 card uses less than 75W of power at peak and supports everything you'd expect a Radeon HD 3000 series product to support. With a custom cooler and high clocks, this card from PowerColor looks the part and should perform fairly nicely with great gaming visuals. - Overclock3D

PowerColor Radeon HD 3650 Extreme Edition Review

PowerColor have gone with the familiar cyber woman on their packaging for the Radeon HD 3650 Extreme edition. Inside shows a decent amount of protection for your card, although more could have been put in. The bundle that comes with the Radeon HD 3650 is a little sparse, but that is to be expected we suppose as this is a lower end card. The card itself looks pretty decent with the usual ATI red PCB and an great looking black cooler. The card is very compact and certainly won't crowd your case, unlike the higher end cards. As we said, the card is a good looking little beast with great features to back it up.

The PowerColor card comes equipped with a quite generous 512MB of GDDR3 memory, which are Samsung chips rated at 1.0ns and as such capable of 2000MHz effective clock speed. The card has two dual link DVI outputs and a TV-out. The Radeon HD 3650 is HDCP compatible and so capable of outputting to an HDCP enabled HDTV. Also of note is the fact that these cards also natively support DisplayPort, so expect to see some examples cropping up soon. The cooler on the PowerColor Radeon HD 3650 Extreme is an excellent little heatsink with fan combo, and this fan is whisper quiet even at higher speeds.

Unfortunately RivaTuner does not yet support the Radeon HD 3650, so we were forced to use the in-built ATI overclocking facility in the Catalyst drivers. We feel this and the beta nature of the drivers has held back the overclock a bit. The Radeon HD 3650 is a good solid low-mid range card that should do well in terms of sale figures for AMD. With PCI Express 2.0 support as well as a whole host of little extra features such as power saving and possible DisplayPort support, the Radeon HD 3650 just edges it over the slightly faster GeForce 8600 GT. Excellent value for money, with the PowerColor set at around $90.