ATI Radeon HD 3600

Radeon HD 3600 is a name which makes the fact that this is "the new HD 2600" quite obvious. To be precise, we had a Radeon HD 3650 with 256 MB of DDR3 RAM tested. This card is the strongest model in its "family". Beside this one, we will be seeing models with 512 MB and 1 GB of RAM on the market. We suppose you have already noticed the fact that this card doesn't have DDR4 memory onboard. We believe that this is ATI showing that they learned their lesson - DDR4 memory raised the price of HD 2600XT while providing close to no performance benefit. The GPU featured on the HD 3600 series cards is named RV635, and seems quite an improvement over the last generation at first glance. First of all, 55 nm production process ensures lesser power consumption and lower temperatures while reducing the surface of the chip itself.

The new card also supports PCI-Express 2.0, just like other next-gen cards. Exclusively for ATI (at least for now), the card supports DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 as well. However, the GPU just had to be restrained somehow, so the card features the old 128-bit memory bus. The number of stream processors remained unchanged as well, only 120 of these. Same goes for TMU number, which there are 4 of. When you look at this list, you might expect a large jump in performance, however, this is not the case. As a matter of fact, we were slightly disappointed by the card's performance, probably because of the false hopes the technical characteristics created. When a chip's production process is reduced, the first thing people are likely to expect are higher clock values.

This was the unexpected turn, since the GPU on the HD 3650 is working at a mere 725 MHz, which is 75 MHz lower than the HD 2600XT's clock! Even the maximum overclock value allowed in Catalyst drivers is 760 MHz, which the card accepts with no problem at all. This is probably with a reason, since the cooling system doesn't seem too efficient. It is nice to see a quiet, single-slot cooling solution, but not at the cost of cooling performance. GPU temperature was 57°C in idle mode, while the card was constantly over 80°C under load. These temperatures are hardly commendable. The card was perfectly stable, but there is no hope of overclocking it a lot, at least not with the default cooler. We presume that card manufacturers won't wait long to present their own versions of this card, with a better cooler. It is simply unbelievable that a card like this, with such a perfected production process and declared power consumption of <75 W, is prone to heating this much. Naturally, no external power source is needed in form of an additional connector. Video capabilities of this card are just as good as any newer ATI card's - fantastic. While playing 1080p HD video material, the CPU load in a completely average home PC was 14%, which is a remarkable result.

As the card we received has no additional equipment whatsoever (we received a sample directly from ATI), there is not much to be said about that aspect. The picture of the card is enough to describe it, and we would add that its dimensions are just the same as HD 2600XT's which have DDR3 memory onboard. The active cooler with its slow fan rotation is not too efficient, which might be a consequence of the cooling body covering both the GPU and memory chips, and this cooler doesn't seem up to the task of cooling all that. The user has one S-Video and two DVI connectors at disposal, which is great for a card in this price range.