Checking Out the Engine, a Look Inside...

Enough about the looks, time to dig a bit deeper. Let's see what lies beneath the cooling system of the Gainward BLISS 8400 GS edition graphics accelerator. We are taking a look under the hood by pulling of the cooling solution. As you know by removing the cooling system you are voiding the warranty of your graphics card. So, only for those who don't care about the warranty and want to see what's underneath, with proper handling the heatsink can be removed for whatever reasons. However we don't recommend it, but at the same time we wanted to share the real stuff that makes the GeForce 8400 GS what it is today. And take into account that Gainward clearly states that with a nice sticker on the back of their graphics card. So let's check together...

To get rid of the cooler, it is just a matter to remove the screws. Doing so you can remove the heatsink covering the graphical processing unit and two of the four memory chips. As the heatsink did cover almost the full PCB, taking it off somehow spectacular to find out what is hidden away, just as what we have seen with the GeForce 8600 series. In fact most of the components haven't been visible from the start on the front of the PCB. Once the heatsink was removed we get a good view of the PCB and see that it isn't that overloaded with resistors and voltage regulators. Quite a plain view, with only the G86 core, memory chips, some minor other electronic components and that's it. Sober though very efficient and with some real processing potential.

The GeForce 8400 GS is powered by the new G86 series line of graphics processors. The G86 core used is physically the same chip as you will find back on the GeForce 8500 GT video card and features the unified shader technology, represented by the stream processors. The NVIDIA G86 chip uses an 80nm manufacturing process for its high performance circuits and has been designed from scratch around the unified shader logic, though along the lines of the more powerful G80 chip. The GeForce 8400 GS core works at 459MHz operation speed on the Gainward version which is the same as the reference design as detailed by NVIDIA.

	GeForce 8400 GS	Radeon HD 2400 PRO
Core Speed	459MHz	525MHz
Memory Speed	800MHz	800MHz
Stream Processors	16	40
Memory Size	256MB DDR2	256MB DDR2
Memory Interface	64-bit	64-bit

With the introduction of the G8x GPU's we see a new era being kicked off which is all about the unified shader technology. To incorporate this within the GeForce 8400 series we see that NVIDIA has come up with the stream processors which can be used in a unified way as vertex or pixel shaders. That means that these are no longer fixed to just being a vertex or pixel shader, but their function changes according to the processing needs. With a unified GPU architecture some bottleneck between pixel, shader and geometric processing is reduced to a great extend. These stream processors have their own speed setting, which is called the shader clock. For the BLISS 8400 GS the shader clock speed is set at 918MHz, following the reference design.

The Gainward BLISS 8400 GS edition comes with four memory chips in total which are all located on the front and back side of the board. The memory chips are placed at one side of the G84 graphics core. Each of these memory chips are cooled either by the passive cooling or at the back these just need to rely on the airflow within the case itself. The ram chips are placed two by two and give a total of 256MB memory. The GeForce 8400 GS version, just like the reference design though is still using the DDR2 memory chips which come at a cheaper price tag. This is not a real issue as the memory interface is only operating with a 64-bit wide bandwidth so combining this with higher grade and thus more expensive memory chips wouldn't make a real difference.

With 256MB DDR2 memory the Gainward BLISS 8400 GTS edition is equipped for experiencing the graphical power of current and upcoming gaming technology to a certain extend. It features Elixir branded DDR2 memory which is running at 800MHz speed. These Elixir DDR2 chips come marked as 3.0ns access time and are therefore rated at only 677MHz frequency and normal operating at 1.8V. Yes, indeed Gainward is already going over the rated frequency, but they know these chips are up for more and also getting a bit more voltage. So what does that mean...no overclocking? Well, not at all as these Elixir memory chips are of the best quality you can get and can reach even 1000MHz with a bit of luck. And maybe even more...