Gigabyte GeForce 8400 GS 256MiB
Gigabyte's GeForce 8400 GS ships with slightly faster-than-default speeds of 459MHz for the core and 918MHz for the shaders. There's 256MiB of 800MHz-clocked DDR2 on-board, which is bang on reference money, and the half-height nature makes it useful for smaller home-theatre-oriented chassis.
Producing less than one-tenth of the texture fillrate of the single-GPU GeForce 9800 GTX, the 8400 GS requires only a small aluminium heatsink to keep the G86 core working efficiently.
NVIDIA doesn't support multi-GPU SLI with this model and we can see why.
The GPU connects to your motherboard via a first-generation PCIe x16 slot that has more than enough bandwidth for card.
Knowing that 3D performance isn't going to be stellar, NVIDIA and ATI have concentrated on the 2D feature-set.
Gigabyte's documentation states that the HDCP-enabled DVI port can export dual-link video (2,560x1,600) to an external display, but we found this not to be the case, with the conduit single-link (1,920x1,200) in nature. The inclusion of a VGA port is sensible enough, considering that CRTs are still in widespread use in office environments. The mini-DIN socket provides video-out-only.
Summary
Competence is the keyword with the GeForce 8400 GS. Gigabyte's model, priced at around £25, isn't particularly special in any area, though.
