HIS Radeon HD3650 Review :: HIS HD3650 Bundle

• HIS HD3650 Turbo card
• HDMI to DVI adapter
• DVI Adapter
• Driver CD
• Molex CrossfireX bridge
• Free Games offer from Steam
• Manual

HIS offers a comprehensive bundle when it comes to their HD3650 video card. The hardware portion of the bundle includes both a HDMI to DVI adapter and a DVI adapter. HDMI monitors have hit the market, but are quickly being overtaken by the DisplayPort connector. Still, most LCD monitors come with either DVI or HDMI connections and using the HDMI connector to play PC games on your HDTV is a good idea.

The Crossfire Bridge is in a Molex package. This allows the HD3650 to connect to one two or even three other 3650s in Crossfire mode. The resultant four card solution can offer performance much higher than a single HD3650 card or even the bigger brother HD3870 cards for similar prices and power requirements. CrossfireX requires two or more of the same card generation, a Crossfire bridge for each to connect to the next card and a motherboard with two or more PCI Express x16 slots available to it.

ATI launched the 9800XT late 2003 with a coupon for the game Half Life 2. While that was a long time ago in video card times, HIS has included a card with the offer of a free HL2: Lost Coast and HL2: Deathmatch offer. The card also offers special pricing on HL2 and other games available on Steam. ATI and Valve began offering this bundled with their cards late last year so it doesn't affect the costs of building the card to HIS.

ATI releases a new driver every month or so with the latest available being Catalyst 8.6 released in the last day or so. This driver was released too late for inclusion in this review. Catalyst drivers bring an amazing amount of control to the settings including anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. The HD3xxx series is capable of doing 8x MSAA with tent filters allowing for an effective 24x. I find the tent filter to be a bit blurry but it does clear up the image quality compared to no AA.

Driver screenshots

Using the Catalyst Control Center's Overdrive utility I was able to overclock the HIS HD3650 from the default clock of 790/840 core/memory to an amazing 840/990MHz, a full 50MHz overclock on the core and 100MHz overclock on the memory speeds. The ICEQ Cooler on the card allows for cool operations at the overclock of 42C on idle, just a one degree higher than default clock (41C).