Detailed Impressions, Passive Cooling...

Having gone through the first impressions of the GeForce 8400 GS accelerator, it is time to check a bit deeper and reveal the real nature of the Gainward BLISS 8400 GS graphics card. We will actually take a closer look and highlight some of the vital features. We will start with the front and move slowly to the underlying components. As we already mentioned the Gainward version is following the reference design, though coming with Gainward's own passive cooling solution. Next to the different cooling design, it is a low profile card which can offer extra value to some consumers when looking a those home theatre boxes. Gainward came up with a fully passive cooling design to keep the card cool and quiet while running the newest game titles.

As already mentioned, the main advantage relates to the passive cooling solution that Gainward is using on their entry level GeForce 8400 GS edition. This will come in handy for the home theatre PC's owners who do need a silent card with the new unified shader technology of the GeForce 8 series. The Gainward version looks sturdy, though light and on top of all it's quite impressive. The actual PCB is partly hidden away behind the single slot passive cooling solution. Peeking out at the bottom we see the PCI Express interface connection. Just as most manufacturers have done, Gainward didn't stick with the reference cooling design by from NVIDIA but is using a version of their own. Just as other vendors, Gainward is following the product line as set by NVIDIA which isn't really setting their products apart from the competition.

The passive heatsink does cover a big part of the PCB only leaving some less interesting electronic components visible. The heatsink is a bit bigger than the actual PCB in terms of height which allows having a bigger area to cater for the heat dissipation. Just to highlight that no ventilator is used, but surely you could easily add one if you would like to, especially when you have a not so good airflow. As you might know when using a passive cooling it will only be well effective if the airflow within your computer case is sufficient to reduce the heat build up on the passive heatsink. And what about the looks, does that need any words? Well we don't think so, as it looks just great...

	GeForce 8400 GS	GeForce 8500 GT	GeForce 8600 GT
Core	459MHz	459Hz	675MHz
Shader	918MHz	918MHz	1450MHz
Memory	800MHz (64-bit)	800MHz (128-bit)	2000MHz (128-bit)
Processors	16	16	32

Now to situate the GeForce 8400 GS, it is in fact the entry level version of the GeForce 8 series next to the GeForce 8500 GT accelerator. The GeForce 8400 GS is the low-end card, which comes so far in only one version, featuring the G86 core and equipped with fast DDR2 memory chips. Next to that you have the GeForce 8500 GT, which you can consider somehow a variant of the GeForce 8400 GS but having a more advanced 128-bit wide memory interface. And following to that you got the GeForce 8600 series, where we just put down the GT version which also features the better memory interface but also comes with a better graphics core, namely the G84 which has the double amount of stream processors. As these cards are of course all DirectX 10 compliant, and featuring a more optimized unified shader architecture.

And what about the rear view? Well it doesn't bring any surprises, and does look like most NVIDIA based graphics cards. Plain and simple that's the least you can say about the back side of the video card. In fact there isn't that much to see and therefore becomes less spectacular. However we will try to uncover as much as possible by giving some impressions. Almost all the major components are brought to the front of the card so the back side will only reveal some minor parts like electronic interconnections and resistors. Although with the GeForce 8600 GS you will also see that two memory chips are placed on the back side. On the PCB we spotted the position of the GPU itself, the G86 chip. This is outlined by the high concentration of electronic contact points and small resistors.

And yes, this card is actually a low profile version, although with Gainward applying a slight bigger passive cooling solution this is somehow no longer true. You won't find any SLI connection on the GeForce 8400 GS, which is a bit logic considering the low-end status of the board. The BLISS 8400 GS edition requires no extra power, which means that the power supplied via the PCI Express slot is enough to render all graphical gaming sceneries. In the end this is a very nice looking graphics card with a nice passive heatsink in the colors of Gainward, which should be able to please quite some buyers just looking for a simple low priced card and that is as quiet as a mouse.