What video card, supporting the latest popular features, would one on a tight budget be looking at? Say around the range of $55, HDCP ready, DirectX 10 support...feeling challenged? You shouldn't, with one such as the Point of View GeForce 8400 GS around. Cheap, full featured, and most importantly, a ton of overclocking headroom for maximum value out of your tight budget. This card is a feisty little demon and just like its bigger brothers and sisters of the GeForce 8 family, the GeForce 8400 GS has a full support for Shader Model 4.0. And on top of all that, Point of View is a well known brand with an extensive range of NVIDIA based graphics cards and excellent support. - VR-Zone

Point of View GeForce 8400 GS HDCP Ready Review

The GeForce 8400 GS comes in a small box, with the rather standard green goblin on the front of the Point of View box. Actually all the boxes of the GeForce 8 series feature the same front image and is easily spotted as such. It is a low profile card, so don't worry about tight squeezes in small cases. Also, there is no need for a PCI Express power connector. The GeForce 8400 GS has a simple PCB layout, and you just have to know that it draws very little power. The default clock speeds are 450MHz core, 800MHz memory and a shader speed of 900MHz for this low-end graphics card.

As our main focus is around the overclocking potential of the GeForce 8400 GS, we actually didn't waste much time and started to see how far we could take it. The core goes to 580MHz, and the memory to 1000MHz out of the box. That is a very decent overclock on the core and memory, showing pretty impressive headroom! Just doing that brings performance up another level, and almost similar to as when one which could run a dual SLI config with two of these video cards. And next to all that the temperature is not jumping too high, remaining quite cool at those overclocked speeds.

Now going one step further and applying some hardware modifications in terms of the core voltage of the G84 chipset, raising it from the default to about 1.5V. This should allow the core to go much further and show greater overclocking. And yes, doing so we reached 740MHz on the core in terms of overclocked core speed which is very close to the double of the reference clock speed. Considering it is on the default cooler, and with no additional PCI Express power connector, this result is surely impressive. This certainly brings the GeForce 8400 GS very close to the next step up in the GeForce 8 products range.

Not everyone should spend $500 on a video card. In many cases, it is not necessary when one just needs some required features and a little 3D power, just to play some occasional games and watch some High Definition videos. In this scenario, the Point of View GeForce 8400 GS delivers great value for the money, just look at the free performance bundled from the overclocking headroom out of the box. Around $55 is what one needs to fork out and one thing is for sure, this card will not heat up your case much at all!