Last week AMD introduced the ATI
Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series, which are the new low-end graphics processors
compared to the Radeon HD
3800 series. These budget graphics cards are branded as the Radeon HD 3450,
3470, and 3650 and are all available for under $100 USD. While they may be
cheap, they are the first graphics cards to introduce support for DisplayPort.
DisplayPort is the newest digital display interface standard, backed by VESA,
and is direct competition to HDMI. DisplayPort has yet to be fully supported by
the available Linux display drivers, but the Catalyst Linux driver already supports
these new ATI graphics cards and there will be open-source support through the
RadeonHD driver in the coming days. At hand today we have the Sapphire Radeon
HD 3650 512MB graphics card as we deliver the first Linux benchmarks for this
RV635 GPU.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 graphics card boasts 512MB of 128-bit
GDDR3 video memory running at 1.6GHz, built on 55nm fabrication, 725MHz core clock,
and contains 120 stream processors. The HD 3650 supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL
2.0. Like the other graphics cards in the Radeon HD 3000 family, the RV635 is
PCI Express 2.0 compliant and has other functionality common to the R600 series
such as CrossFireX, ATI's Unified Video Decoder, and HDMI support with 5.1 surround
sound audio. An addition to the Radeon HD 3650 that cannot be found on the Radeon
HD 2600 series, which the RV635 replaces, is support for PowerPlay.
PowerPlay is supported by the binary Linux driver (and is expected in the future
for xf86-video-radeonhd) for adjusting the core/memory frequencies and voltages
in order to conserve power and reduce the heat-output when the graphics card doesn't
need to be fully utilized.

This budget graphics card from Sapphire had arrived in a small
cardboard box that had contained a couple of accessories that were secluded from
the PCI-E graphics card itself. These accessories had consisted of a component
video output adapter, composite video adapter, one VGA to DVI dongle, DVI to HDMI
audio/video adapter, Sapphire driver CD, Sapphire case badge, and a quick installation
guide. For being a graphics card retailing for ~$100 USD or less, the packaging
and included accessories were fine by our standards.
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