AMD has recently turned their team, that used to be ATI, into a much more productive part of their business.  The HD3870 X2 proved very powerful and affordable for enough consumers that it is considered a success.  Add the flexible CrossfireX into the picture and things start to look rosy for AMD’s graphics.  Then we start to see cracks, specifically the HD 3650, which replaces the HD 2650 as their sub $100 graphics card.  As Ryan’s testing shows, we are back to being disappointed as the 8600 GTS proves to be too much competition.

“When the Radeon HD 3650 card was first released we were a little underwhelmed by the specifications as it seemed that nothing had been improved upon when compared to the previous, RV600-based HD 2600-series of cards. And in fact that is the case: performance remains mostly the same while power consumption has dropped and thus heat output too. That doesn’t make the HD 3650 a home run though as NVIDIA’s answers to the card continue to stack up and perform better – the 8600 GTS with half the frame buffer was easily outpacing the Sapphire HD 3650 card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory even when overclocked.”

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

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