A Closer Look

The cooler used is a completely basic VGA cooler made from aluminum only with a traditional fan + fin design. This is a fine solution that works great for this class of card and helps keep the price down.


This card can be used with any other HD 3650 and all other RV635 cards. Seeing two CrossFire connectors there means that CrossFireX is supported as well which will be announced very soon and allows collaboration of more than two VGA cards working together.


An extra power connector is not needed to run this card, all you do is plug it into the PCI-Express slot which will supply all the operating power required.


Like on all current NVIDIA cards, GDDR3 is used. The Samsung chips carry the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A. With a nominal latency of 1.0 ns (= 1000 MHz) and a default card clock of 900 MHz, they have some overlocking potential left. We actually saw more than 1050 MHz on our sample.


The GPU is the ATI RV635, which is made at TSMC in a 55 nm process. Other than a die shrink from 65 nm to 55 nm there are no major changes in this chip compared to the RV630 which was used on the HD 2600 Series. The comparison with the match shows that this is a very small chips that is very cheap to make.