HIS is an Hong Kong based manufacturer of graphics cards that uses ATI chips exclusively. The market for high-end cards is about to change with the release of the Radeon HD 4800 series in the next few weeks, but there's no indication of cards to replace the mainstream as of yet. With every new generation of ATI cards, there's a high-end, a mainstream and a value segment. The Radeon HD 3650 is the mainstream version of the Radeon HD 3000 series, the Radeon HD 3450 was the value segment of the Radeon HD 3000 series. The card on our bench today is the HIS Radeon HD 3650 Iceq Turbo edition card, based upon the mainstream chip from ATI with some HIS modifications. - Motherboards

HIS Radeon HD 3650 IceQ 512MB Turbo Card Review

The Radeon HD 3650 board is based upon ATI's RV635 chip which is built on ATI's well known 55 nanometer process. The Radeon HD 3650 has 378 million transistors, more transistors than the Radeon X1950 XTX cards even though those were the high-end cards of a couple of years ago. There are 120 stream processors and the card fully supports DirectX 10.1. HIS has clocked their Radeon HD 3650 at 790MHz, a 65MHz increase over the standard ATI card reference clock speeds. With the IceQ cooler the temperatures of the card reach about 50°C while under stress, which is a very low and good value.

The HIS Radeon Radeon HD 3650 Turbo card has a 7-fin fan on the rear of the cooler on the front of the PCB. The cooler is their patented IceQ3 cooler that lowers the temperature of the video card by up to 20 degress when in operation. The cooler reacts with UV rays giving a cool blue effect when in operation and low-light. The card is a short card by modern respects allowing fit into any case with a PCI Express slot. There is 512MB of GDDR3 memory on the HIS card. Each of the memory modules is rated for 1800MHz, and HIS has set the memory clock on the card to 1780MHz, just below the maximum level.

ATI cards like the Radeon HD 3650 have two CrossFire bridges, allowing for the use of up to four Radeon HD 3650's to be used together improving performance in games and applications. The HIS Radeon HD 3650 is an overclocked version, so when paired with a different card the HIS card will default to the lower speed in CrossFire mode. The Radeon HD 3650 is a PCI Express 2.0 card. HIS includes a HDMI to DVI adapter that allows the video card to use a HDMI port on a HDTV or monitor that sports a HDMI port. HIS has included a card with the offer of a free Half-Life 2 game, does reminds us on the days Half-Life 2 was introduced.

Using the Catalyst control center Overdrive utility we were able to overclock the HIS Radeon HD 3650 from the default clock of 790/1780MHz to an amazing 840/1980MHz, a full 50MHz overclock on the core and 200MHz overclock on the memory speeds. The IceQ cooler on the card allows for cool operations at the overclock of 42°C on idle, just a one degree higher than default clock. The Radeon HD 4850 is being released at a price point of $199, but nothing has been said about the mainstream version of that card that corresponds to the Radeon HD 3650 which we have checked out today in all its glory and details.

The Radeon HD 3650 fits into the $70-100 price range making it a mainstream choice for the consumer. The HIS card is an excellent example of the Radeon HD 3650 as it has a high clock speed, good overclockability, and the very high performance IceQ cooling system to keep the graphics chip cool even under load. The next few weeks should be interesting as new cards like the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce GTX 260 reach the market.