Over the past few years, NVIDIA have become used to holding the performance crown firmly on their brow. With the recent introduction of ATI as the queen bee of the GPU world with their Radeon HD 4800 series of cards, especially with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 card taking the top performance award, NVIDIA have been playing catchup. With that said, the green camp have released a wide range of mid-range cards with very low price points, in an attempt to draw in the mid to budget range crowd. Today we have the GeForce 9400 GT card from Zotac, a company that's reputation has grown steadily over these last few years. Will this card stand up to our scrutiny? We will check it out. - XSReviews

Zotac GeForce 9400 GT 512MB ZONE Version Review

The box and bundle for the GeForce 9400 GT is literally exactly the same as Zotac's GeForce 9500 GT. The Zotac GeForce 9400 GT arrives in the usual Zotac styled cardboard box with a computer rendered angel on display on the front. At the rear of the box sports an in-depth briefing about the product and a couple of screenshots to show its full capabilities. The specifications any potential buyer needs to know are listed in bullet point fashion on the left side of the box. Unfortunately no games are included. The GeForce 9400 GT card is a passively cooled card therefore a large heatsink occupies a large majority of the card.

This heatsink folds over to the recurring side. At the rear of the card are both DVI and analog ports as well as a video jack for connection to a TV display. All the capacitors dotted about the card are of the fully shielded solid type. As well as these, the chokes are of the ferrite variety. And using these will mean greater performance and reliability as they tend to last much longer and they don't start spewing out hot acid when reaching high temperatures. Now using nTune, we managed to raise the core frequency from 550MHz to 760MHz and the memory frequency from 1350MHz to 1800MHz effective clock speed.

This was a stable overclock with the GPU temperature not topping 54°C. With a fan cooling the GPU, we're sure this card could be overclocked much further, but we didn't want to risk it too much being that it is passively cooled. As this card is fanless, it's completely silent, which is a joy for silence enthusiasts everywhere. Zotac haven't seemed to have released a price for this version of their GeForce 9400 GT card, so the price is somewhat unknown. But going by other cards of this type, it's probably in the $65 region. That it somehow the average price tag of the current GeForce 9400 GT version from others brands.

Unfortunately the GeForce 9400 GT does not yield itself to be a graphics card for the gamer with its unfortunately poor performance in most titles tested. However though, given its silence, it would make a perfect companion for a home theatre PC with it being capable of playing high definition content. Although, don't knock this card right off the list of gaming cards, with it being such a great overclocker, a bit of tweaking would allow for gaming on less intensive, or perhaps older titles. It would make an excellent card for a young gamers PC for example.