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512 Geforce 8400 Gs Video Card

The video card has slowly become the second most important part of any computer, as it's responsible for most of the mathematical calculations needed for 3D graphics. Even though more and more powerful graphics processors are integrated into the microprocessor, there's still a huge gap between the architecture of the processor needed by application functionality and that of the 3D graphics processor. To sum it up, the graphics processor has between 12 and 1600 parallel processing units, while applications can only use about 2-8 x86 processing cores efficiently.

Asus En8400gs/s/p/512 Geforce 8400 Gs Video Card (Source: images.highspeedbackbone.net)

The nVidia Geforce 8400GS video chip is considered very old, as 6 generations were released after it. On the market you may find 1-2 video cards based on these chips in most retail store's price list for about $30-50, but there's no longer need for such hardware in new computers. The integrated graphics processors have evolved beyond low-end graphics cards, mostly in in AMD APU microprocessors. AMD's first attempt, the AMD E-350 and C-50 APUs, were quite successful, offering much more stability than their Intel rivals in parallel processing. The second attempt was a much superior desktop/laptop product called Liano, which has 2-4 processing cores for applications and 160-400 Radeon stream processors for graphics. These Liano APUs clearly outperform nVidia's old Geforce 8400GS graphics chips and offer a lot more compatibility and features too (ex: Eyefinity on 2-3 monitors).

The ASUS EN8400gs/s/p/512 Geforce 8400 GS video card is (was) a very well designed piece of hardware, fitted with the two most popular output ports (analog VGA and DVI) and a passive heat sink, ensuring that it doesn't add to the noise levels of the computer system.

Asus En8400gs/s/p/512 Geforce 8400 Gs Video Card (Source: techfuels.com)

Other video card models (to reduce cost and avoid complications related to possible overheating) are equipped with an extremely small heat sink and a high speed noisy cooling fan. This ensures low operating temperatures, but the noise level may exceed all other components in an average desktop computer. Users who are concerned with both their physical and psychical health should choose the ASUS EN8400gs/s/p/512 Geforce 8400 GS video card with the passive heat sink, if they have decided that they need a Geforce 8400 GS video card.

Today the best low-end video card for PCI-Express 16X slots is the Radeon 6450 from AMD. It features 160 stream processors and 512-1024MB on-board memory, accessed through a 64bit memory bus. It may cost up to 30% more than a Geforce 8400GS video card, but it offers three times more performance, DirectX 11 compatibility and the Eyefinity technology. With compatible integrated AMD graphics processors it can also be used in Hybrid Crossfire (aka. Dual Graphics) mode.