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.