Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3650 1GB review

news · May 21, 2008

The Radeon HD 3650 looks to be an attractive product on paper, it is the

latest member of the Radeon HD 3000 series, and can carry up to 1GB of

memory on-board. The 3650 is also a Direct X 10.1 compliant card that

supports the PCI Express 2.0 bus. Furthermore, like all Radeon HD 3000

series products, this new low-end graphics card is built using a 55nm design

process. Topped off with a 725MHz core speed, the Radeon HD 3650 sounds like

quite a gutsy little graphics card.

But of course the card had to fell short in other places, otherwise we

wouldn't be calling it a budget product. For example, it is limited to a

128-bit wide memory bus, and when combined with rather sluggish GDDR2

memory, the Radeon HD 3650 produces a memory bandwidth of just 16GB/s. To

put this figure into perspective, it is comparable to the Radeon X700 XT

which was released back in 2004. This goes to remind us what is the Radeon

HD 3650 is targeted to a certain less demanding crowd and that we shouldn't

expect spectacular results on the gaming front.

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