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.

Here are the specs of our test systems.

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Premium with the 8.3 ATI Catalyst Drivers and Nvidia's 169.28 Forceware drivers. V-sync was disabled with all tests.

Let's start things off with Crysis, the most advanced game engine on the market currently.

Here we see some excellent numbers from the overclocked Radeon HD 3650 with the card obtaining a very playable 34 frames per second at 1024x768 with medium settings. We were actually shocked how little it lags behind the GeForce 8600GTS at both resolutions only 3fps slower and easily besting a GeForce 8600 GT. The 3450 doesn't fair as well here and shows that the card is more of a mainstream offering.

We switch over to id and Splash Damage's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, one of the last Open GL games on the market. Open GL has typically favored Nvidia and this tends to be the case here but we also see the GeForce 8600 GT suffer heavily at the higher resolution of 1600x1200 due to low memory clock speeds while the overclocked 3650 performs excellently and just under the GeForce 8600 GTS.

The Unreal 3 Engine is easily the most popular gaming engine of our current time in a significant number of titles and thus performance we should pay close attention to. As with Crysis Saphire's Radeon HD 3650 Overclocked is only slightly behind Nvidia's GeForce 8600 GTS and more than playable at a higher resolution, although we ran at a lower detail setting. The 3450 is also quite playable at 1024x768 though at 1600x1200 performance dips significantly. Here we see 3x the speed with the 3650 over the 3450.

Blizzard's cash cow, World of Warcraft, is easily one of if not the most popular PC title on the market today and although an older game performance we are quite interested in. We put the graphic detail settings at their highest and here we see the Nvidia cards in an good posistion, the first time where the 3650 OC loses out to the GeForce 8600 GT. This is an older title so we don't believe this to be indicative current or future titles but it is a very popular PC title.

We finish our benchmarks with Futuremark's 3DMark 2006 SE which gives us about the same results we saw in most of our testing.

Finally we move onto power consumption where the 3450 naturally consumes the less while the 90nm 8600 GTS uses the most at idle levels. However, peak levels from the 8600 GTS and 3650 OC aren't too far off but power consumption will add up over time.