HD 3650 upgrade or not ?

I think the 3650 is cheap! and Worth buying. Go get it.
The PSU thing, blah....
http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeon [...] ments.html
400W according to it's website, 550W for crossfire, though I doubt it uses that much...

I wouldn't expect more performance out of it though vs a X1650XT while paired with the single core 3000+.

I think it would be a solid card gaming without fsaa. Should be more powerful than the X1650XT. It should consume less power than the X1650XT too, not even needing a power cable attached. So I wouldn't let either of those concerns stop you.

It's a good card for a kid's PC, or for an HTPC. The only "drawback" is that it doesn't do hybrid Crossfire on a 780G board (only the 3450 and 3470 work for that).

It's what I have in my wife's PC right now while we're waiting for the 4850 to be released. I almost got a 3850 for that PC but cancelled it because the 4850 was announced the next day. So I got the cheap DDR2 3650 instead.

Great performance for HD under Windows Media Center 2005 and decent 1280 x 1024 performance in games at medium settings. If you plan on keeping it for awhile in the spare PC, then get a DDR3 version instead.

I still think it depends on the game as to whether the 3650 or 8600 is better. Plus we do video in addition to games, so the 3650 is a good stopgap until 4850 or 4870 in the fall.

Mactronix might want to consider an 8600, but he mentioned video as well as light gaming for the kids. I built two almost identical systems recently for my son and for my niece and nephew, the only difference is my son has a 500 watt Antec Truepower Trio PSU:

Athlon X2 4600+
ASUS 780G motherboard (HDMI capable)
Seagate 250 SATA
Sony DVD ROM
Pioneer DVD-RW
2 gigs Kingston DDR2 667
Sapphire 3650 DDR2

The 3650 is a stopgap that will get replaced with a 4850 come Christmas, and I'll have to replace the power supply in my niece and nephew's PC later too, as it has a legacy Cooler Master Real Power 450 with only 22 amps on the 12 volt rail. Though Cooler Master PSU's aren't the best, this is one that was rated tier 3 a few years ago and I used it for 2 years in my old P4. So, it's held up fine.

It won't play Crysis on high, but at their ages, they're into Fate (10+) and Guitar Hero. Most of their game playing is on consoles (except my son's really gotten into older CRPG's like Icewind Dale).

Basically, I was aiming close to what AMD recommends for their first tier gaming system. My wife's used to me building all our PC's but my sister in law's more used to name brand PC's like Gateway, so sticking close to AMD's vetting of name brand mainstream gaming box's was a good idea.

I could then show her this article with a caveat that it would need to be updated every couple of years:

http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+GAME+ [...] e11820.htm

As for the guy's reply comment about logo'd PC's sitting around for two years and not playing the next WoW, I doubt that that game (or any MMORPG) will change all that much, and we've found that LOTR Online, while looking better with a 3870x2, still looks good with a 3650. In fact, we tried it out with my wife's 690G integrated video on low settings and it didn't look any worse than Morrowind, which we still play.

Only the most popular single player RTS, FPS and CRPG's ever push the envelop where graphics is concerned. MMORPG's are designed for a wider appeal, and that's why game developers have a right to be upset at Intel integrated graphics as the most common GPU's in PC's bought from big box store PC's.

So, AMD's Game! is a step in the right direction. Nvidia should do something similar. Intel's a lost cause unless Larabee works out a few years from now.