Well, it has been a while since the launch of the Radeon HD 3800 series that had users raving over their bang for buck. Will the Radeon HD 3650 follow in the footsteps of the Radeon HD 3870? Although AMD had failed to snatch the performance crown from NVIDIA with the launch of their RV670 chipset a couple of months back, they certainly had users and enthusiasts raving over the bang for buck performance that the cards could provide. However, the arrival of the Radeon HD 3800 series of cards have left their Radeon HD 2600 series dangling in no mans land without a refresh of its feature set. Fortunately for ATI, they have seen to this by announcing their Radeon HD 3650 line. - VR-Zone

ASUS Extreme AH3650 256MB TOP Graphics Preview

The new card we have today is ASUS' rendition of the Radeon HD 3650 but with a difference. ASUS being ASUS, wouldn't leave the new RV635 GPU alone and so the Extreme AH3650 TOP we received is a factory overclocked version of the Radeon HD 3650. Featuring a dual slot cooler, a 128-bit wide memory bus and GDDR3 memory, the card certainly looks very promising on paper. We shall take the Extreme AH3650 TOP and pit it against the competition and see if it would live up to the hype generated by its elder breathen. The ASUS version runs in at 800MHz core and 1800MHz memory effective clock speed.

By editting some configuration files, we were able to use RivaTuner to overclock the ASUS Extr(eme AH3650 TOP even further. After some adjustments, we were able to get the card up to 972/2142MHz just with the stock cooler. That's approximately 172MHz up from the already overclocked GPU and memory. The card truly lives up to its TOP overclocking performance namesake. The ASUS Extreme AH3650 TOP version retails at the same price as the stock GeForce 8600 GT cards but offers more performance. As such, it follows in the footsteps of its elder breathen by offering great bang for buck.

Furthermore, ASUS engineers have made use of the reduced power consumption and heat production of the RV635 to provide a faster solution with minimal increase in price to users. With the stock cooler, we were able to bring the card up to yet higher clocks and gain additional performance with an insignificant increase in heat. Although the arrival of the Radeon HD 3650 in the market is somewhat late, it would easily fill the gap for light to moderate gaming without breaking the bank. With its low heat production, the card can certainly find its way into home theatre PC setups.