Powercolor HD3650 Extreme PCS Edition
Introduction, packaging, package and specification
Published: 26th January 2008 | Source: Powercolor | Price: £65 |
Introduction
ATI recently released a few lower end cards. We gave you a quick preview of the HD3650, along with some technical info here. Now let's take a longer look at the new card that shows ATI are really trying to dominate the mass-market for GPU's.
With a custom cooler and high clocks, this card from Powercolor looks the part and should perform fairly nicely. Let's take a further look.
Packaging
Powercolor have gone with the familiar cyber-woman on their packaging for the HD3650.
Inside shows a decent amount of protection for your card, although more could have been put in.
Not a bad go at the packaging then.
Package
The bundle that comes with the HD3650 is a little sparse, but that is to be expected I suppose as this is a lower end card.
You get:
* Quick Install Guide
* S-Video to composite lead
* DVI to VGA cable
* Driver CD (not shown)
A "C" for Powercolor here..."Could do better".
Specification
Chipset: HD 3650
Edition: Extreme PCS
Chipset Features: ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology
HDMI Output Support
Microsoft DirectX® 10.1
Shader Model 4.1
GPU Speed: 800 MHz
Memory: 512MB
Memory Bit Rate: 128 Bit
Memory Type: GDDR3
Memory Speed: 1800 MHz
Pipelines/Stream Process:
Cooling: Fan
Interface: PCI-E 2.0 (x16)
Connectivity:2 x Dual Link DVI-I
Edition: Extreme PCS
Chipset Features: ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology
HDMI Output Support
Microsoft DirectX® 10.1
Shader Model 4.1
GPU Speed: 800 MHz
Memory: 512MB
Memory Bit Rate: 128 Bit
Memory Type: GDDR3
Memory Speed: 1800 MHz
Pipelines/Stream Process:
Cooling: Fan
Interface: PCI-E 2.0 (x16)
Connectivity:2 x Dual Link DVI-I
Not a bad speed on the core, let' see what the generic specs say:
* 378 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
* PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
* 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
* Ring Bus Memory Controller
o Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
* Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
o Shader Model 4.1
o 32-bit floating point texture filtering
o Indexed cube map arrays
o Independent blend modes per render target
o Pixel coverage sample masking
o Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
o Gather4 texture fetching
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
o 120 stream processing units
+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
o 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
o Shader instruction and constant caches
o Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
o Up to 128 textures per pixel
o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
o Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
o 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
o Physics processing support
* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
* Anti-aliasing features
o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Temporal anti-aliasing
o Gamma correct
o Super AA (ATI CrossFire™ configurations only)
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
* Texture filtering features
o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o Bicubic filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
* OpenGL 2.0 support
* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
o Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
o Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
+ Motion compensation and IDCT
o ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
+ Color space conversion
+ Chroma subsampling format conversion
+ Horizontal and vertical scaling
+ Gamma correction
+ Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
+ De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
+ Detail enhancement
+ Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
+ Bad edit correction
o Two independent display controllers
+ Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
+ Full 30-bit display processing
+ Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
+ Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
+ High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
+ Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
+ Fast, glitch-free mode switching
+ Hardware cursor
o Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
o Two integrated DisplayPort™ outputs
+ Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16001
+ 1, 2, or 4 lanes per output, with data rate up to 2.7 Gbps per lane
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x153622
o HDMI output support
+ Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x108022
+ Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or multi-channel (5.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform con't
o Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
+ Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs
* ATI PowerPlay™
o Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
o Performance-on-Demand
+ Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
+ Clock and memory speed throttling
+ Voltage switching
+ Dynamic clock gating
o Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
* ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
o Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
o Integrated compositing engine
o High performance dual channel bridge interconnect1
1 Bridge interconnect is not required for ATI CrossFireX, and may not be included in all product configurations
2 Some custom resolutions require user configuration
3 Playing HDCP content requires additional HDCP ready components including but not limited to an HDCP ready monitor, Blu-ray or HD DVD disc drive, multimedia application and computer operating system
* PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
* 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
* Ring Bus Memory Controller
o Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
* Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
o Shader Model 4.1
o 32-bit floating point texture filtering
o Indexed cube map arrays
o Independent blend modes per render target
o Pixel coverage sample masking
o Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
o Gather4 texture fetching
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
o 120 stream processing units
+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
o 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
o Shader instruction and constant caches
o Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
o Up to 128 textures per pixel
o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
o Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
o 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
o Physics processing support
* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
* Anti-aliasing features
o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Temporal anti-aliasing
o Gamma correct
o Super AA (ATI CrossFire™ configurations only)
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
* Texture filtering features
o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o Bicubic filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
* OpenGL 2.0 support
* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
o Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
o Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
+ Motion compensation and IDCT
o ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
+ Color space conversion
+ Chroma subsampling format conversion
+ Horizontal and vertical scaling
+ Gamma correction
+ Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
+ De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
+ Detail enhancement
+ Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
+ Bad edit correction
o Two independent display controllers
+ Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
+ Full 30-bit display processing
+ Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
+ Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
+ High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
+ Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
+ Fast, glitch-free mode switching
+ Hardware cursor
o Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
o Two integrated DisplayPort™ outputs
+ Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16001
+ 1, 2, or 4 lanes per output, with data rate up to 2.7 Gbps per lane
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x153622
o HDMI output support
+ Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x108022
+ Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or multi-channel (5.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform con't
o Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
+ Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs
* ATI PowerPlay™
o Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
o Performance-on-Demand
+ Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
+ Clock and memory speed throttling
+ Voltage switching
+ Dynamic clock gating
o Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
* ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
o Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
o Integrated compositing engine
o High performance dual channel bridge interconnect1
1 Bridge interconnect is not required for ATI CrossFireX, and may not be included in all product configurations
2 Some custom resolutions require user configuration
3 Playing HDCP content requires additional HDCP ready components including but not limited to an HDCP ready monitor, Blu-ray or HD DVD disc drive, multimedia application and computer operating system
Let's see what this lot adds up to then.
Most Recent Comments
Not a bad little card at all Kemp, I was very surprised at the performance. It's a pity that it's slightly higher priced because by the time e-tailers add their various profit margins to it the 8600 GT becomes a winner in both performance and price. Regardless, what an insanely cool running card.Quote
I think the market will price it a bit lower after a while. I read in another article that current draw was about 75 watts (quite a bit more than the 8600GT)
I notice the 2 connections for the bridge, I thought how cool to run 3 or 4 of them.
http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m...crossfirex.jpg
I realize the drivers arent the best now but I just think its so cool to see the 4 cards, not to mention no power pigtails needed either.Quote
I notice the 2 connections for the bridge, I thought how cool to run 3 or 4 of them.
http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m...crossfirex.jpg
I realize the drivers arent the best now but I just think its so cool to see the 4 cards, not to mention no power pigtails needed either.Quote