When a new line of cards comes out everybody focuses on the true top-end hardware, playing games at high resolutions and generally seeing how much they push the envelope. What we tend to forget is that after these beasts come out there's a whole score of cards that are produced for the low-end. Cards that more people are interested in from a cost perspective. To that extend we will take a look at the low-end offerings, and more specifically at the GeForce 8400 GS graphics card. Actually the GeForce 8400 GS is currently the entry level card from NVIDIA to enjoy DirectX 10 gaming technology. And on top of that it comes at a very attractive price tag for those on a low budget. - Overclock3D

XFX GeForce 8400 GS 256MB Graphics Card Review

So to that extend we gotten XFX showing of their low-end GeForce 8400 GS graphics acclerator. The packaging on the XFX GeForce 8400 GS is typical XFX, with the cyberdog snarling on the front color. One of the things that struck me was the size of the package with this card. It somehow does seem to be quite small in comparison to almost every package we have come across, but then again it is the low-end offering from XFX. The inside of the packaging is about as minimal as you can get with the card and the small amount of package you get placed inside the box, with also minimal protection of the items.

The XFX GeForce 8400 GS is a half height graphics card and as such is totally suited to home theater and media centre PC's. With an attractive black PCB the card starts off on a good foot with us. The cooler is pretty small and bordering on tacky looking but we don't think this card was exactly made for a case with a window. This slightly budget appearance is made worse by the piece of wire connecting the VGA output to the PCB. The memory isn't covered with a cooler and really the whole card looks like a classic budget card. Still, the fact that the card is half height is a total plus for thin media centre boxes.

The main point of contention people may have with this card isn't really its diminutive size, it's the cooler XFX have chosen to put with it. The fan that is on the card is a very small size fan and although quiet at idle, makes a loud high pitch whining noise when at full load. Additionally after enquiring with XFX about the noise we have found out that an XFX GeForce 8400 GS is being produced without a fan, though pricing and availability is not available at this time. We were able to overclock the XFX version to 550MHz core and 940MHz effective memory clock speed, which is a nice bump over the stock clocks.

The XFX GeForce 8400 GS is a pretty decently performing little card. Gaming at the lower resolutions is a nice experience and was fairly smooth. The HD playback was good and the cards features are definately suitable for a media centre. However my biggest problem is that the fan on the cooler is whiney at full speed and would get incredibly annoying, especially if it was a tense moment in a game or it happened to ramp up during movie playback. For around $55 the card is certainly well within reach for a large amount of the people wanting to play decent modern games at respectable resolutions.