Detailed Impressions, ZEROtherm Cooling...

Having gone through the first impressions of the Radeon HD 3650 accelerator, it is time to check a bit deeper and reveal the real nature of the PowerColor Radeon HD 3650 Xtreme graphics card. We will actually take a closer look and highlight some of the vital features. We will start with the front and move slowly to the underlying components. As we already mentioned the PowerColor version is following the reference design, though coming with a special ZEROtherm professional cooling solution. Next to the different cooling design, it is a dual slot card which can offer extra value to some consumers looking for a more silent operation. PowerColor came up with a professional cooling design to keep the card cool and quiet while running the newest game titles.

As already mentioned, the main advantage relates to the ZEROtherm cooling solution versus the reference cooling design on the more common Radeon HD 3650 version. In the end, this could give some benefits and should offer some extra performance and possible overclocking potential. The PowerColor version looks sturdy, though light and on top of all it's quite impressive. The actual PCB is not as usual hidden away behind the dual slot cooling solution, but we can get a decent view of the card and components. Peeking out at the bottom we see the PCI Express interface connection. Just as most manufacturers have done, PowerColor has also released a similar version but with the reference cooling design from ATI which is a plain and simple single slot cooling solution. Just as other vendors, PowerColor is following the product line as set by ATI, though also setting their products apart from the competition via some special editions.

The Xtreme version is partially covered by the ZEROtherm cooling system which gives us a nice view of the underlying board. The ventilator used by PowerColor grabs the air around it and pushes it through the heatsink and the circular positioned metal slats. Doing so the air gets a decent circulation and takes up the heat generated by the PowerColor accelerator. The heatsink is somehow medium, with that we really mean not long but of a higher profile. This way the cooling can remain slick and doing so PowerColor can keep the noise to a minimum. An excellent way of thinking as a mid-range graphics card shouldn't really get equipped with a large cooling unit just for the sake of it. And what about the looks, does that need any words? Well we don't think so, as it looks just great.

	Radeon HD 3650 256MB	Radeon HD 3650 512MB Xtreme
Core	725MHz	800MHz
Shader	725MHz	800MHz
Memory	1600MHz (128-bit)	1800MHz (128-bit)
Processors	120	120

Now to situate the Radeon HD 3650, it is in fact the mainstream level version of the Radeon HD 3000 series next to the Radeon HD 3450 video accelerator. The Radeon HD 3650 is the mid-range card, which comes so far in only one version, featuring the RV635 core and equipped with fast GDDR3 memory chips. Next to that you have the Radeon HD 3690, which you can consider somehow a variant of the Radeon HD 3650 but having a more advanced processing ability. And following to that you got the Radeon HD 3850 series, where we just put down the standard version which also features the better memory interface but also comes with a better graphics core, namely the RV670 which has almost triple the amount of stream processors. As these cards are of course all DirectX 10 compliant, and featuring a more optimized unified shader architecture.

And what about the rear view? Well it doesn't bring any surprises, and does look like most ATI based graphics cards. Plain and simple that's the least you can say about the back side of the video card. In fact there isn't that much to see and therefore becomes less spectacular. However we will try to uncover as much as possible by giving some impressions. All the major components are brought to the front of the card so the back side will only reveal some minor parts like electronic interconnections and resistors. Though, since this is a special version equipped with 512MB memory it means that half the memory buffer found its place on the back side. On the PCB we spotted the position of the GPU itself, the RV635 chip. This is outlined by the four screws with in the middle quite a lot of small resistors.

And yes located at the top of the board you find the CrossFire connection. Since ATI has introduced the CrossFire technology, almost all their graphics card features this extra technology. The CrossFire connection provides the means to support multi-GPU power. So in essence you can combine the raw processing power of two PowerColor Radeon HD 3650 video accelerators. Of course this CrossFire connection has changed recently and is now an internal bridge. This is actually a great improvement over the old external crosslink for multi-GPU operation. The Radeon HD 3650 requires no extra power, which means that the power supplied via the PCI Express slot is enough to render all graphical gaming sceneries. In the end this is a very nice looking graphics card, being an enhanced version of the previous Radeon HD 2600 series.