The latest offering to come out of the Zotac factory is the GeForce 8400 GS, NVIDIA's current low-end DirectX 10 part. Priced relatively low, you can tell the card is for a certain market of people who really don't want to spend the big bucks or simply can't afford to. The good news is that low-end cards have become better over time, to the point where they are a reasonable upgrade from onboard graphics equipped motherboards. The high-end GeForce 8800 GTX AMP edition from Zotac really impressed us, and shows us that Zotac can be a competitive force in the VGA market. Though in order to survive there is no doubt you have to be able to turn out a high quantity of low-end cards. - TweakTown

Zotac GeForce 8400 GS 256MB Graphics Card Review

Not unlike most low-end cards, Zotac have opted for a smaller box design which shares the same character on the front as the GeForce 8800 GTX AMP edition card we checked last week. The front of the box is very standard as far as information goes, we can see 256MB of DDR2 memory is included on the card, along with the card also having HDCP. The GeForce 8400 GS is the first card in the GeForce 8 series line-up which doesn't support dual link DVI. The back doesn't have any real specifics on the actual card, rather just some of the features that are supported.

With the package out of the way it's time to move on to the card. Following a low profile design and small active fan, this is your average joe right here. The lack of SLI and power connectors make the card pretty bland to look at. There is also no low profile bracket included, so if you want to make use of the card in a low profile case you will have to buy a bracket separately. If you get a low profile bracket you will be able to continue to use the DVI connector and the TV-ut port. The GeForce 8400 GS isn't exactly a power house with a 450MHz core and 800MHz memory clock on the included 256MB DDR2 memory.

In our profession you become very used to testing cards on a regular basis which continue to spit out high scores in 3DMark06, so when you see a card that scores as low as this one it's hard to think highly of it. Though the bottom line is that at this price point it's not actually too bad of a card. In fact it's pretty useful thanks to the low profile design. As for DirectX 10 performance, while we didn't test that side of things out you're going to find that you will be forced to play at lowest resolutions in order to get a playable setup. This would defeat the purpose somewhat, as the lower resolution textures just don't look as good.

The card's package is light and there isn't much to the card itself either. However, it hasn't got an inflated price tag and does a pretty good job of pushing some frames at the lower resolutions. The biggest gripe with the card is the lack of HD PureVideo support, HDCP was chosen to be included and if they decided to add HD PureVideo we could have had one of the best home theater PC graphics cards on the market. With that said though, it isn't Zotac's fault as this is something NVIDIA should have thought of, even if they offered a GeForce 8400 GS HD which offered it and possibly HDMI for a little bit more.