ATI has come back strong lately after some early issues with the Radeon HD 2xxx series, mostly with the higher-end products. Moving to a 55nm manufacturing process and some design tweaks allowed for the 3870, 3850, and more recently the 3870X2 to see huge gains in performance over the previous cards. That update has also hit the more mainstream cards as the Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 have been replaced with the ATI Radeon HD 3450 and 3650. Today we look at both of those cards from Sapphire included an overclocked version of the Radeon HD 3650.

The Radeon HD 3450 and 3650 feature all of the benefits of their higher-end counter parts including as mentioned a smaller 55nm manufacturing process, new PCIE 2.0 support, lower power usage, support for Microsoft's Dirext 10.1, and UVD (Unified Video Decoder) including on all of their graphic boards. Their technical specs do differ though with the HD 3650 featuring 120 stream processors compared to the 3450's 40, eight texture units as opposed to four, in addition to higher clock speeds. The stock clockspeed of a hd 3650 is 725MHz and 1.6 or 1GHz for the memory as compared to the standard 600MHz core clock speed on the HD 3450 and a memory clockspeed of 1GHz. As mentioned earlier though this HD 3650 is overclocked out of the box and thus boasts the higher core speed of 800MHz and 1.8GHz for the memory.

Both of the cards are physically quite compact and neither require external power. The 3450 we received is passively cooled by only a heatsink while the overclocked 3650 features a small heatsink and fan combination. Both cooled quite well and it is clear these cards do not get very hot. Both of these cards also feature 512MB of memory which should be more than enough for the detail settings they are able to handle. The 3450 uses DDR2 memory while the 3650 uses DDR3.

The HD 3450 bundle consists of mostly the necessities as with most more mainstream and lower mid-range cards. Inside is a DVI-to-VGA adapter, component cable, S-Video to RCA, driver CD, manual, and case sticker. The HD 3650 consists of a little more goodies with the above mentioned as well as a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, Crossfire bridge, 3DMark 2006, and Cyberlink's DVD suite as well as Power DVD7.

Let's move onto our test system specs.