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HDCP-compliant Biostar V8402GL26

HDCP-complian Albatron 8400GS
NVIDIA takes on the entry-level DirectX10 market with a sub-$100 retail graphics card

Graphic card manufacturers silently launched retail GeForce 8400GS-based add-in boards this week. The GeForce 8400GS is NVIDIA’s newest retail entry-level offering, slotting below the GeForce 8500GT. NVIDIA previously released the GeForce 8400GS a couple months ago to OEMs only.

The retail GeForce 8400GS arrives ready to take on AMD’s upcoming ATI Radeon HD 2400-series. The entry-level offering introduces DirectX and shader model 4.0 to a sub-$100 price point. NVIDIA also packs the GeForce 8400GS with PureVideo HD for hardware accelerated video decoding, which accelerates decoding of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG2 high-definition video formats.

GeForce 8400GS-based cards feature 16 stream processors clocked at 900 MHz with a 450MHz core clock – similar to the GeForce 8500GT. NVIDIA pairs the GeForce 8400GS with 256MB of 400 MHz, 800 MHz effectively, DDR2 memory as with the GeForce 8500GT. However, NVIDIA has castrated the memory interface, leaving the GeForce 8400GS with a 64-bit interface instead of the 128-bit interface found on the 8500GT.

Expect GeForce 8400GS-based cards to start popping up in retail within the coming weeks. A quick search reveals MWAVE is the only retailer with a GeForce 8400GS in stock for $70.

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$70 for HDCP
By mdogs444 on 6/21/2007 1:18:04 PM , Rating: 2
So in reality - how would the performance of this card compare with the previous 6 & 7 series cards? Perhaps on par with a 6600GT, 6800GS?, 7300GT, GTS?




RE: $70 for HDCP
By h0kiez on 6/21/2007 1:43:53 PM , Rating: 2
In reality, it's good for running Aero and decoding HD disks. I wouldn't try much gaming on it. I'd bet it's worse than midrange cards from a year ago. I have an 8600 GT and it's no monster gaming card...but I only paid $90 for it.


RE: $70 for HDCP
By HaZaRd2K6 on 6/21/2007 2:08:52 PM , Rating: 4
Yeah I agree. It's that memory interface Nvidia stuck the cards with. My old X800XL is an AGP card with a 128-bit bus and it would probably perform better than these cards in a gaming scenario. Then again, you've gotta cut something to get it down to less than $100, and I'd rather lose some bandwidth than a chunk of memory.

On another note, does this new card use the VP2 processor or the VP1? I know the VP2 is on the 8500 and 8600 cards and the VP1 is on the 7x00 and 8800 cards, but which one does this have? Because if it's got the VP2, it could be the perfect HTPC card, especially the silent versions...


RE: $70 for HDCP
By Anh Huynh on 6/21/2007 2:26:26 PM , Rating: 3
It has VP2. The 8800-series is the only 8-series with VP1.


RE: $70 for HDCP
By Samus on 6/21/2007 2:41:51 PM , Rating: 1
Right, my AGP GeForce 6800GT is much smoother in Battlefield 2142 than my 7600GT in my mediacenter, and its AGP.


RE: $70 for HDCP
By hans007 on 6/21/2007 4:12:31 PM , Rating: 3
the x800xl was 256bit btw


RE: $70 for HDCP
By Powered by AMD on 6/21/2007 4:53:49 PM , Rating: 1
the X800XL is 256 Bits Wide, BTW, the 7300GT and also 6600GT are for sure better than this castrated 8500GT. Its just not a gamer card, not ever for The Sims 2 IMHO.

And I agree, if its using the VP2 is a great card for HTPC.


RE: $70 for HDCP
By coldpower27 on 6/21/2007 10:06:49 PM , Rating: 2
It's a 7300 GS replacement so it should have performance somewhere in the ballpark of the 7300 GT, since the 8500 GT would be somewhere at 7600 GS level. Performance would be not too good obviously, but it's a cheap video card that allows your system ram to be unshared and you get PureVideo 2 with all the cool video offloading processing.


RE: $70 for HDCP
By kattanna on 6/21/2007 4:44:04 PM , Rating: 1
if memory serves me well, when the 8600 came out is was tested against the 7600 cards and lost in most tests.

so the 8400 to me sounds like it will equal on board video


RE: $70 for HDCP
By coldpower27 on 6/21/2007 10:08:04 PM , Rating: 2
Not really, the 8600 GT won easily against the 7600 GT, the 8600 GTS is somewhere between 7800 GT to 7950 GT level variable by the game of course, the more shader heavy, the better.


RE: $70 for HDCP
By Spoelie on 6/22/2007 5:20:55 AM , Rating: 2
um no, not really, in most common games, the 7600gt is on par with the 8600gt, it's only in the shader heavy games (oblivion, stalker) that the 8600 can maintain a 20% lead. But not in games like hl2 ep1, quake4, battlefield 2 etc.


RE: $70 for HDCP
By Targon on 6/22/2007 6:45:01 AM , Rating: 2
This is the tricky thing when you are looking at only a one generation change. Is the mid-level card from last generation all that much slower than a mid-level card from this generation?

In some cases, the answer is a clear yes, but in others, it's really not worth it. The big changes tend to come in the high-end, or when the previous generation of cards were sub-standard(see the old Geforce FX 5600 for example).

To really check the performance, you need to check the reviews from various sites, not just how well the newer cards compare with others from the same manufacturer, but also how well they compare to the competition(in this case, ATI/AMD). I am sick to death of seeing comparisons between Geforce cards without seeing how they compare to similar priced ATI/AMD cards, or Radeon comparisons that don't show how the 15 flavors of Geforce cards compare to the Radeon card being reviewed.

I also want to see comparisons that show how well the cards run on their home turf. Radeon cards in an ATI/AMD chipset based board and Geforce cards in a NVIDIA based board. We have seen in the past that there have been some performance penalties for running an ATI based video card on a NVIDIA chipset motherboard. It's all good to see how well cards run on an Intel chipset board, but Intel isn't the only player in town.


RE: $70 for HDCP
By clairvoyant129 on 6/22/07, Rating: 0
Too much of a good thing?
By AmberClad on 6/21/2007 2:18:03 PM , Rating: 5
I think the danger with releasing so many different variants with so many different suffixes is that it starts to become very hard even for enthusiasts to know where a particular card stacks up performance-wise without consulting benchmarks (especially compared with previous generation cards).

LE, GT, GTS, Ultra, GTX, _800, _600, _200, the list goes on and on. And it all becomes very muddled up after a while. This generation's LE may get outclassed by a previous generation's GT. The most recent _300-level card may perform less well than a previous _800-level card. Et cetera.




RE: Too much of a good thing?
By bhieb on 6/21/2007 4:45:21 PM , Rating: 2
I agree throw in all the board, memory, and processor classes and it becomes almost impossible to build a PC today. Every componenet has 10 different performance levels and picking the wrong level of any of the 4 big components can cost you big on the performance side.

There used to be a pretty clear sweet spot between price & performance, but now it is so very hard to find. I remember not long ago that sites like anandtech used to list price/performance ratios, but I have not seen that in a while. There are just way too many components that drastically impact performance.

Oh the madness!


RE: Too much of a good thing?
By AmberClad on 6/21/2007 8:21:23 PM , Rating: 3
Agreed. And the issue is even more of a problem with mid-range and low-end components like this particular one. You mentioned Anandtech -- AT, along with THG and [H]ard|OCP, primarily seem to focus on enthusiast-level, high-end components. But faced with a mid to low-range part, many of us are just as clueless as the next guy because fewer reviews for those exist.

In Nvidia's case, maybe they need to adopt a multi-tier naming scheme similar to what Toyota and other car companies use instead of slapping the "GeForce" brand on every consumer-level card. Example: Lexus = high-end, Camry = mid-range, Corolla = entry-level/low-end. And they could still stick a secondary suffix onto the end to distinguish between the different variants of the same model (Corolla LE, Corolla S, for example).

I know that Nvidia has the XX00 naming scheme, but while that was useful with the 6 series (you only had the three main variants -- 6200, 6600, and 6800), it became far less useful with the 7 series and 8 series, both of which use almost all of the numbers in between.


RE: Too much of a good thing?
By Chillin1248 on 6/24/2007 1:08:38 PM , Rating: 2
Here is a list I composed of the 6-8 Geforce series and the Xxx-X2xx series:

Nvidia:

Geforce 6 series (NV4x)
6200
6200 LE
6200 LE TC (Turbo-Cache)
6200 SE TC (Turbo-Cache)
6200 TC (Turbo-Cache)
6500
6600 LE
6600 128MB
6600 256MB DDR2
6600 GT
6610 XL
6700 XL
6800
6800 XE
6800 LE
6800 XT
6800 GS
6800 GT
6800 Ultra
6800 Ultra "Extreme Edition"

Geforce 7 series (NV4x/G7x)
7100 GS
7300 SE
7300 LE
7300 GS
7300 GT
7500 LE
7600 LE
7600 GS
7600 GTL
7600 GST
7600 GT
7800 GS (G70 256MB)
7800 GS+ (G71 512MB)
7800 GT
7800 GTX
7800 GTX (Ultra) 512MB
7800 GX2
7900 GS
7900 GT
7900 GTO
7950 GT
7900 GTX
7900 GX2
7950 GX2

Geforce 8 series (G8x)
8300 GS
8300 GT
8400 GS
8500 GT non-HDCP
8500 GT HDCP
8600 GS
8600 GT non-HDCP
8600 GT HDCP
8600 GTS
8600 GTS 512MB GDDR3
8800 GTS 320MB
8800 GTS 640MB
8800 GTX 768MB
8800 Ultra

=======================

ATI/AMD

Xxxx Series (R4xx)
X300
X300 LE
X300 SE
X300 SE Hyper Memory
X550
X550 Hyper Memory
X550 XT
X600
X600 SE
X600 Pro
X600 XT
X700
X700 SE
X700 LE
X700 Pro
X700 XT
X740 XL
X800 128MB
X800 256MB
X800SE
X800GT
X800 GTO
X800 GTO/2
X800 Pro
X800 Pro VIVO
X800 XL
X800 XL 512MB
X800 XT AIW
X800XT
X800 XT VIVO
X800 XT PE
X850 SE
X850 Pro
X850 XT
X850 XT "Crossfire Edition"
X850 XT PE

X1xxx Series (R5xx/RV5xx)
X1300
X1300 Pro
X1300 CE
X1300 XT
X1550
X1600 Pro
X1600 XT
X1650 Pro
X1650 XT
X1800 GTO
X1800 XL
X1800 XT
X1800 XT 512MB
X1800 Crossfire Edition
X1900 GT
X1900 Pro
X1900 AIW
X1900 XT 256MB
X1900 XT 512MB
X1900 XTX
X1950 GT
X1950 Pro
X1950 XT
X1950 XTX
X1900 Crossfire Edition
X1950 Crossfire Edition

Radeon HD X2xxx Series (R6xx)
Radeon HD 2200
Radeon HD 2400 Pro
Radeon HD 2400 XT
Radeon HD 2600 Pro
Radeon HD 2600 XT
Radeon HD 2900 XL
Radeon HD 2900 XT (512MB GDDR3)
Radeon HD 2900 XT (1024MB GDDR4)

All-In-Wonder (AIW)
ALL-IN-WONDER X600 PRO
ALL-IN-WONDER X800 GT
ALL-IN-WONDER X800 XL AGP
ALL-IN-WONDER X800 XL PCIE
ALL-IN-WONDER X800 XT
ALL-IN-WONDER X1800 XL
ALL-IN-WONDER X1900

MAC version:
X800 XT MAC EDITION
X1900 MAC Edition

Have fun figuring them out.


RE: Too much of a good thing?
By colonelclaw on 6/22/2007 6:57:28 AM , Rating: 2
excellent point. too many numbers and suffixes. i have no idea how this product will compare

wouldn't it be nice if the graphics card manufacturers named their products after some performance rating? if a neutral body was in charge of setting up the benchmark it may even work

by the way, thats an idea with the likelyhood of happening up there with world peace, cure for cancer etc


SLI anyone?
By tacoburrito on 6/21/2007 3:35:07 PM , Rating: 2
Can someone tell me the performance for the 8400 when paired in SLI?

Just kidding.




RE: SLI anyone?
By shabby on 6/21/2007 7:04:38 PM , Rating: 2
Should i get two 8400gs' in sli or one 8500gt...


RE: SLI anyone?
By The Boston Dangler on 6/21/2007 7:37:54 PM , Rating: 3
if you play video games, don't get either. buy one good vid card. if you don't play video games, and still want SLI, turn off your computer.


RE: SLI anyone?
By coldpower27 on 6/21/2007 10:11:01 PM , Rating: 2
This is Nvidia's budget core, I don't think it supports SLI technology, that is typically a midrange or higher feature.


pricing
By ss284 on 6/21/2007 1:33:58 PM , Rating: 1
Wasn't this card supposed to enter at the below $50 price point? The 8500GT is going for roughly $80, and even less AR.




RE: pricing
By daBKLYNdoorman on 6/21/2007 1:41:40 PM , Rating: 2
The price will probably come down a bit over time.


RE: pricing
By MatthewAC on 6/21/2007 2:11:55 PM , Rating: 2
Prices are always at about a 20 dollar markup when they come in.
The 8600's were that way, so was the 8500, so will this.


RE: pricing
By Anh Huynh on 6/21/2007 2:27:42 PM , Rating: 2
This is MSRP pricing, which is what you'll pay at Best Buy.


1/2 Height Cards
By AkumaX on 6/21/2007 2:22:04 PM , Rating: 2
I noticed that these cards look 1/2 height. You think these cards will come with a 1/2 height bracket to use in a slim case?




RE: 1/2 Height Cards
By Anh Huynh on 6/21/2007 2:27:02 PM , Rating: 2
It's up to the card manufacturer.


RE: 1/2 Height Cards
By EnzoFX on 6/21/2007 5:23:56 PM , Rating: 2
yes, it appears that both of these cards here will probably have a low profile pci bracket, since they have the detachable vga cable. great for those small htpc cases


Purevideo included?
By The Boston Dangler on 6/21/2007 7:33:45 PM , Rating: 2
"NVIDIA also packs the GeForce 8400GS with PureVideo HD for hardware accelerated video decoding."

So the stand-alone Purevideo software is included with purchase? Or does the card simply have this ability, like all other NV cards?




RE: Purevideo included?
By Anh Huynh on 6/21/2007 8:04:35 PM , Rating: 2
It has the ability. PureVideo HD is the hardware capabilities. You're thinking of the PureVideo Decoder, which is NVIDIA's software.


RE: Purevideo included?
By kirbalo on 6/22/2007 12:03:04 PM , Rating: 2
...as opposed to Purevideo which had to be purchased, PureVideo HD is enabled in the latest drivers.


SFF Cards are needed
By bapcorp on 6/21/2007 6:11:01 PM , Rating: 2
At my work we have got lots of new SFF computers. These are loaded to the brim with all the good stuff like C2D, 2 Gig ram etc. But onboard video which really sucks, funnily enough though they have a pci-e x16 slot. So it would be great to see some SFF video cards come out on the market. I just wish pong wasnt the only game to achieve 25 fps on them.




RE: SFF Cards are needed
By Calin on 6/22/2007 3:02:59 AM , Rating: 2
Most uATX boards have one PCIE x16, one PCIe x1 and one PCI slot. Some have another PCI slot.
Only when buying brand name computers in small form factor (Dells and so) could you be cheated out of the x16 PCIe slot


Good office computer card?
By bravacentauri83 on 6/22/2007 8:33:18 AM , Rating: 2
Would this be a good video card to choose for building an office computer? Only game it will be playing is freecell. :-)




By Comdrpopnfresh on 6/22/2007 9:24:56 AM , Rating: 2
"NVIDIA has castrated the memory interface"




AMD is probably drooling right now...
By daBKLYNdoorman on 6/21/07, Rating: -1
By KristopherKubicki (blog) on 6/21/2007 1:20:43 PM , Rating: 2
Well this card was originally proposed for OEM only. When NVIDIA realized they didn't have a $70 price point, they went off and rolled it into the retail channel.


RE: AMD is probably drooling right now...
By Lightning III on 6/21/2007 3:05:27 PM , Rating: 3
let see do they want the high failure rate of the 680i

or the silent launch of the under performing 7050 intergrated chipset won't even touch the halo 690 IGP chipset (i think the only IGP that will run aero )

in nine days the 2600XT which should be the new HTPC Halo card at least on paper their 65nm gpu has no external power need's and has a lower heat signature

do you think the ultra would cost 700 dollars if there was choice at the top rung

even if you love the green machine only an idiot would not root for AMD right now

competition = lower prices

they have always had sub par performance with their must pay extra for pure video

although I have owned a few of their overly hot chipsets and except for the above mentioned issue been satisfied with their products


RE: AMD is probably drooling right now...
By hubajube on 6/21/2007 4:10:16 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
in nine days the 2600XT which should be the new HTPC Halo card at least on paper their 65nm gpu has no external power need's and has a lower heat signature
Considering that NONE of the HD video software out there supports ATI cards I don't see how this is going to be a HTPC Halo card.


By jay2o01 on 6/21/2007 5:35:47 PM , Rating: 2
Cyberlink's PowerDVD 7.3 supports ATI AViVO hardware acceleration on my x1950...


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