Introduction

Hong Kong-based Sapphire has been in the industry for a while, manufacturing primarily video cards and motherboard chipsets. It's the largest supplier of ATI-based cards in the world, and was the first to release a card with an HDMI connector. ThinkComputers got its hands on Sapphire's Radeon HD 3650 OC Edition, a faster, more spacious version of the mid-range card from the red team. We subject this card to a battery of tests to see how it measures up to one of the best the green team-nVidia-has to offer.

Features & Specifications

- 120 stream processing units
- PCI Expressr 2.0 x16 bus support
- 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
- High-speed 128-bit HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering
- DirectXr 10.1 / Shader Model 4.1 support
- 55nm process technology
- Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing
- ATI PowerPlayT energy conserving technology
- Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for Blu-rayT and HD DVD at full HD 1080p
- ATI CrossFireXT multi-GPU support

Packaging

The Sapphire Radeon HD3650 OC Edition box is a standard ATI-based card box: lots of red and black, with a pretty girl holding a gun on the front. It mentions support for PCI-E 2.0, DX10, Shader Model 4, HD video decoding, and, wait...what's this 5.1 Surround audio support? Just wait, baffled reader, just wait.

Inside the box is the well-packed card and the various peripherals which accompany it: a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, a component and composite video out adapter, a CrossFire connector, a manual, and driver/software media.