Review: The £50 graphics card market

HEXUS.bang4buck, overclocking, final thoughts and HEXUS certification

The Sapphire card was successfully overclocked from 800/1,800MHz to 850.5/2,070MHz. The overclocked memory speed, in particular, was impressive.

The better cooling on the HIS card saw engine and shader clocks pushed up to 877.5MHz but memory faltered at anything above 1,908MHz.

The overclock gives around 10 per cent more performance than the standard showing, highlighted on page eight. Engine and shader speed is worth more than memory bandwidth here.

Final thoughts

Thinking about gaming performance in February 2008, we reckon that an outlay of £50 buys you the same kind of speed that £75 did six months ago.

Users wishing to run the latest games at 1,280x1,024 with reasonable image-quality settings will just about make do with either of our review cards today, or, indeed, any of the quartet shown in the performance comparisons.

Answering the pressing need that arises from running either Blu-ray or HD DVD titles on your PC, the Radeon HD 3650 and GeForce 8600 GT are both well-suited to the task, offloading the decode process on to a dedicated portion of the silicon.

Sapphire's Radeon HD 3650 512MiB is only incrementally better than the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR3 that it disposes, but the additional bolt-ons are enough to discard shortlisting the latter. Sapphire's pre-overclocked SKU is generally quiet in action and its single-slot profile will be a boon for users with small chassis.

HIS, though, uses the base HD 3650 design and slaps the dual-slot-taking IceQ cooler on top, which results in a slightly higher street price but lower noise. It's pre-overclocked, too, but falls just short of the Sapphire's performance.

Our nod would go to the Sapphire card, simply because it achieves the same performance as the HIS but is both cheaper and, for what it's worth, doesn't take up the adjacent slot.

Both cards can be put forward as worthy upgrades from integrated graphics, for now, and their feature-rich design makes for a good base on which to construct a media-centric PC around.

Bottom line: the Radeon HD 3650 is a good SKU and Sapphire makes the most out of it with its ~£50 pre-overclocked model.

HEXUS.certification

The HIS Radeon HD 3650 IceQ Turbo successfully passed all of our stringent tests without failure. However, this is not an overall recommendation to buy.

HIS Radeon HD 3650 IceQ Turbo 512MiB

HEXUS Awards

Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 Overclocked

HEXUS Where2Buy

HEXUS Right2Reply

Should any of the companies wish to comment on our findings, their thoughts will be published here, verbatim.

Full Review

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