Introduction

Not long ago AMD announced their new HD 3400 and HD 3600 Series which are the follow up to the HD 2400 and HD 2600 cards. The HD 3650 from PowerColor we have on our testbench today is based on the RV635 GPU which is just an optical shrink of the RV630. An optical shrink is like you would put the chip's blueprint on a photocopier, set it to 85%, make the copy and then build the chip using the new plans. Ok, there are some bugfixes too, but nothing that will change performance of the architecture. What changed is the process size. By going from 65 nm to 55 nm, AMD can save some money on the manufacturing cost of each GPU.

Packaging & Contents

Typical PowerColor package; Final Fantasy like warrior on the front, product highlights in multiple languages on the back.



You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Instruction Manual + Driver CD
• HDMI Adapter + DVI Adapter
• TV out cable

The Card

After handling all these powerful NVIDIA cards in the last weeks I suddenly felt surprised by the small size of the HD 3650's PCB. Why a dual slot cooler was chosen for this card is not apparent to me, but the target market for these card should not have any space issues anyway.


The card features two DVI outputs which can be used with digital flat panels for resolutions up to 2560x1600. In case you still have an old analog display you can use the included DVI adapter. HDMI+HDCP+Audio is also supported, the adapter you need is included in the box. All recent ATI cards support digital HDMI audio as well. This is achieved by a sound card device integrated inside the graphics chip. When the driver is installed it will show up as a sound card in Windows, play audio on it and it will be included in the HDMI datastream going to your TV.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site.