ATI Radeon HD 3650 512MB

Up until the point of running these benchmarks, we were unsure of what to expect from the Radeon HD 3650 when it came to the graphics performance. However, once the benchmarks finished we were pleasantly surprised. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB was noticeably faster than the Radeon HD 2600PRO, which it replaces, and had outperformed the NVIDIA 8600GT competition in all of the tests. The Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 had sharply outperformed the Radeon HD 3650, but that's to be expected from graphics cards that cost at least 60% more (or double in the case of the HD 3870).

These are just our initial Radeon HD 3650 benchmarks under Linux and we will be delivering more in the near future as we look at other Radeon HD 3400/3600 graphics cards. We will also be holding off on drawing any conclusions until that time, but the Radeon HD 3650 512MB does appear to be a reputable PCI Express 2.0 graphics card to handle your basic gaming needs for under $100 USD. We will also be publishing an additional article once the open-source RadeonHD driver supports these newest AMD graphics processors.