With many shoppers closing their wallets, it's no surprise to see ZOTAC rolling out a selection of low-end alternatives to the usual GPU monsters on offer.
Today, it's another HTPC-orientated part in the form of the GeForce 9400 GT Synergy Edition. The card, pictured below, sports a low-profile design and comes bundled with low-profile brackets that'll make it ideal for thin HTPC chassis.
Armed with a GPU clocked at 550MHz, 512MB of DDR2 memory clocked at 800MHz and 32 stream processors clocked at 1,400MHz, it's as close to a GeForce 9500 GT as you can get before switching to quicker DDR3.
The problem, we feel, is that the card isn't passively cooled - a trait actively sought after by many HTPC users. There's no word on pricing yet, but with most GeForce 9400 GT offerings priced dangerously close to their superior GeForce 9500 GT counterparts, we'd expect to see this one at around the Ā£45 mark. If so, a tenner more could bag yourself ZOTAC's passively-cooled GeForce 9500 GT Zone Edition.
To those who find low-profile designs matter not, there's also a full-size ZOTAC GeForce 9400 GT 1GB edition being rolled out. Sadly, the bump in DDR2 memory is countered by a lower stream-processor count of 16.
Official press release: ZOTAC Expands Entry-level GeForce 9400GT Lineup