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Review: EVGA 8400GS 256MB

01.22.08 - 12:04pm

Today I have in my hands a rather unusual card. I don’t believe I have laid hands on such an underwhelming card but I figured it’d be a hoot to play with and potentially become my new benching card, for CPU benching that is. This 8400GS comes equipped with a G86 GPU core complete with 8 shaders, 4 ROPs, and a 64 bit memory bus. Compared to the G92 8800GTS 512MB with it’s 128 shaders, 16 ROPs, and 256 bit memory bus and the 8400GS looks a wee bit underpowered. Enough slamming this card though, for $35 it’ll be a bit of cheap fun and I might even be mildly shocked in it’s performance on my bench.

The Card

Looking at the 8400GS is like looking at a toy poodle, it’s cute and cuddly and invokes no sense of power. The half-height PCB has a few capacitors, a choke, some mosfets, four DDR2 chips, and a single-slot cooler with a tiny fan. Popping the heatsink off the GPU reveals the cute G86 core that powers this card while revealing all the traces for the memory and power. The memory on the PCB is Samsung 2.5ns DDR2, given the stock 1.9vdimm there isn’t a whole lot to be expected in regards to overclocking.

Tests

Naturally I’ll be running through 3DMark01/03/05/06 and Aquamark 3. Through the tests themselves I’ll be running the CPU at 2GHz and 4GHz and the GPU at stock clocks and maximum air-stable clocks. I’m pretty certain that once I am done playing with this card on air-cooling I’m going to try and strap my cascade to the little GPU and see what sort of clocks I can wrench out of it.

Testbed

Fresh from the Gigabyte overclocking contest, I’ve decided to opt for my QX9650 along with my faithful MSI P35 Neo2-FR. Powering the setup will be my 700w OCZ GameXStream and keeping the CPU cool will be my Scythe Ninja Rev. B. I’ll be using my PC2-8000 Firestix for the system memory and the RAID0 Seagate 7200.10 setup to reduce any system bottlenecks.

Results

The stock results weren’t all that impressive however the overclocks themselves were very interesting. Sadly there isn’t any software voltage modifications for this card else it would really scream, even under the stock heatsink. Sure the performance isn’t up to par with even my 2 year old 7900GTO but it sure was fun to play with. The stock clocks were 450MHz on the core, 900MHz shaders, and 400MHz memory. Overclocked, the card achieved 600MHz on the core, 1200Mhz shaders, and 415MHz memory. Given a slight voltage bump 700-800MHz should be possible as core temperatures barely broke 55C at full load. All the tests were performed four times, twice with the CPU at 2GHz and twice with the CPU at 4GHz and at each CPU tier the GPU was clocked at stock and overclocked settings.

Conclusion

This is no benching card, but it’d be perfect for an HTPC. While I barely did this card justice with these benches, it does have the ability to decode H.264 and VC-1 within the GPU, freeing up CPU clock cycles and making high-definition content a possibility for any PC with a PCIe slot. I did try to enable PureVideo along with PowerDVD but I failed to notice a CPU load difference between using the 8400GS with and without hardware acceleration. I have however seen many reviews with incredible performance boosts with PureVideo, Anandtech’s review last summer does a great job highlighting this particular aspect. At the end, if you are looking for a GPU for the office, for an HTPC, or for any other non-GPU intensive application, the $30 8400GS would be a decent choice. I would not recommend it for any sort of gaming besides Minesweeper or for setting any records besides the 8400GS 3DMark records.

Pros

• Cheap Cost
• Half-Height PCB
• Incredible HTPC Potential

Cons

• Equipped with Terrible DDR2
• Difficulty with PureVideo(partly reviewer’s fault)

Final Score: 8/10

Category: Articles, Hardware, Review