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Nvidia Partners Roll Out the 8400GS Entry-Level Video Card

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Jun 25, 2007 06:59 GMT  ·  By
Albatron's 8400GS VGA Card
   Albatron's 8400GS VGA Card

Although Nvidia have recently claimed that they are not planning to roll out the 8400 series anytime soon, it seems that some integrators have already rolled out versions of this very card. In terms of pure power, the GeForce 8400GS is NVIDIA's newest retail entry-level offering and comes as a direct competitor to the HD 2400 series delivered by AMD.

Just like the HD 2004, Nvidia's entry-level offering introduces DirectX and shader model 4.0 to a really cheap video card which will probably have a MSRP of over $100. Aside from the obvious capabilities of the video card, the 8400GS will also feature PureVideo HD for hardware accelerated video decoding (decoding of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG2 HD formats - VC-1 is partially accelerated while the HD 2400 also supports VC-1 in its UVD hardware).

GeForce 8400GS-based cards use a classical 16 stream processor design. The stream processor is clocked at 900 MHz with a 450MHz core clock - similar to the GeForce 8500GT. In its classical form, the GeForce 8400GS chip will be coupled with 256MB (GDDR2) of 400 MHz (800 Mhz-DDR). However the performance of this GPU has been seriously crippled due to the fact that it uses a 64-bit memory interface.

Currently only Albatron and Biostar have rolled out versions of the 8400GS but more will follow in the next months. The expected MSRP for this particular card will fit in the $70 mark but due to the fact that most manufacturers already announced versions with even more (or less) Ram than the usual 256MB, the price might vary too.

One more thing, though. As far as I can tell, the HD 2400 Pro will have the same memory interface. However its chip will probably be clocked a lot higher (575MHz) and as a result the performance index of AMD's entry-level card may turn out to be a lot higher.

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