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Zotac 9400GT Zone Edition

Roydon Cerejo, Sep 03, 2008 1021 hrs IST

NVIDIA tries to entice the HTPC crowd with its latest offering.

Expert Rating:

55nm, DVI audio, Passive cooler, Low power consumption.

Takes up two PCI slots, A bit pricey given the performance.

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EXPERT REVIEW

Just after the launch of the 9500GT we heard rumors of a low-end mainstream card that would cater mostly to the HTPC users and casual gamers. Zotac was the first one to give us a sample of NVIDIA's latest offering. This 9400GT from Zotac comes from their 'Zone' Edition line up in which they use a custom cooler for their cards.

This time they've chosen a rather unique-looking aluminum heat sink that's quite large and sort of wraps around the card (more on that later). First let's check out the specifications and also what sort of new features NVIDIA has added, or should I say removed from the 9500GT to create this one.

Specifications

From the specs we can see that it uses the same core as the 9500GT did. This G96b core is based on the same 55nm fabrication process by TSMC. The core is clocked at 550MHz, which is the same as NVIDIA's reference speeds. The shader and the memory too are stock, coming in at 1400MHz and 800MHz respectively.

Thankfully the bus width is still 128-bit and they haven't butchered it further to 64-bit because the stream processors seem to have been cut in half to just 16 compared to 32 on the 9500GT. Since this is meant for the budget conscious consumers, they had to cut costs and have provided DDR2 type memory running at a speed of 800MHz effective.

Vendors may still choose to change the memory type but that would certainly drive up the cost and so Zotac have stuck to the reference and gives 512 MB worth of DDR2 memory. Of course there are other variants in the line up with lesser memory in case you wish to spend even less.

USER COMMENTS

"That's not all, even the power consumption is pretty relaxed taking a maximum draw of around 120W on full load and 98W on idle - perfect for a download rig or and HTPC." I wonder why people would add a graphics card for a download rig??

by Jack Sparrow, Hyd, on Feb 25, 2009 10:10 PM, Report abuse Reply

Damn stupid review. Do you atleast have common sense? Benchmarking a graphic card meant for htpc with a quad core extreme?? where's the sense in that

by Jack Sparrow, Hyd, on Jan 20, 2009 01:39 PM, Report abuse Reply

how much this beuty cost??

by Ahmad, Delhi, on Oct 04, 2008 03:45 PM, Report abuse Reply

how it help in gaming....

by Gaurav P, Jaipur, on Sep 29, 2008 11:28 AM, Report abuse Reply

What is the point of benchmarking this card? it's supposed to be an HTPC card and you do crysis benchmarks on it? Where is the number crunching on it using standard AMD/Intel CPUs and Processor usage on blu-ray playback? How about quality of playback? Very stupid review

by rajesh, sachdevia, on Sep 04, 2008 02:03 PM, Report abuse Reply