We've been so concentrated on the release of new GeForce 8800 series cards and more recently the release of the GeForce 9600 GT that we've somewhat forgotten about the new mid-range and low-end cards from AMD carrying the Radeon HD 3450 and Radeon HD 3650 naming scheme. We sometimes forget that not everyone has the money or the need to use these higher end cards. So today, we're going to look after the people on the other side of the fence. So we've got two cards, the low-end Radeon HD 3450 which is supposed to replace the Radeon HD 2400 series of cards, and the new Radeon HD 3650 which is supposed to replace the Radeon HD 2600 series of cards. - TweakTown

Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 and HD 3650 Board Review

Like most low-end cards we've seen from Sapphire over recent times, the box of the Radeon HD 3450 is a nice little design that stands upright. The front of the card has a picture of a chick with a gun and gives us the standard run down of information. We can see the brand across the top of the card while the bottom shows us the model along with some of the main features. The right of the box shows the inclusion of 256MB of DDR2 memory along with the ATI, Vista and CrossFireX logo. Why anyone would CrossFire such a low-end card is beyond us, but it's available if you want it and mind come in handy in the end.

Moving to the Radeon HD 3650 we have a larger box that gives us the same run down as the smaller one really. The bottom of the card has the model number while we see the brand across the top. The middle of the card shows us another picture of a woman with a gun and to the right we see some of the main features like 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and being and overclocked version. Turning the box over we have some more details on the features of the card along with a bit of a blurb. There is also a little section that tells us what is included within the box. As was the case with the HD 3450, we see some awards as well.

The Radeon HD 3450 doesn't have a whole lot going for it. It would be okay for a home theater PC thanks to hardware decoding, but that's about all. These days with the price of motherboards and their integrated graphics you don't even need a card like this for an office machine. You really have to wonder what the market is like for these low-end cards these days due to that reason alone. Even in the event that you wanted a video card for a home theatre PC, we would probably opt for something better that had HDMI unless you really needed the low profile ability, which is often needed in those low profile multimedia boxes.

The Radeon HD 3650 on the other hand is your typical mid-range graphics card. It's going to play most games at standard resolutions. Once you go any higher than that though, you're going to start running into problems with your frame rate. Thanks to the inclusion of the HDMI adapter in the Radeon HD 3650, it doesn't make it a bad choice for home theatre PC users, especially since you could do a bit of low resolution big screen gaming if you wanted to. The Radeon HD 3650 has a market we can easily see is useful, but we really have to wonder what kind of person buys the Radeon HD 3450 these days.

It's not thatthe Radeon HD 3450 is a bad card, it's just more so the fact that we don't know exactly where it would go in the market. It's really only for people on an absolute budget who don't have onboard graphics. The Radeon HD 3650 is going to do alright for people who want to do some low resolution gaming, just make sure you get the GDDR3 model as it is considerably faster than the slightly cheaper models.