Viewing page 1 of 7 pages.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NextAsus EN9400GT Silent Edition
Mar. 14, 2009 by Lawrence Lee
|
Product
|
Asus EN9400GT SILENT/DI/512MD2
PCI-E Graphics Card
|
|
Manufacturer
|
|
|
Street Price
|
~US$60?
|
Modern integrated graphics platforms have evolved to the point where they
possess all of the features of their low-end discrete counterparts with poorer
3D performance being their only failing. However, any informed user seeking
good 3D performance for gaming would not consider either option, so that
advantage of the budget discrete video card is all but negligible. Budget graphics cards still have some value however, for example, as a cheap upgrade for older systems incapable of decoding
HD video or to support additional displays in a multi-monitor environment. There
are also enthusiasts with no interest in gaming, who build PCs using ATX motherboards
without integrated video. Even if they don't play games, they still need graphics.
For such scenarios, even a bottom of the rung GPU would be acceptable. One candidate is the Asus EN9400GT Silent, a passively cooled card based on nVidia's GeForce 9400 processor. If GeForce 9 was an office hierarchy, the 9400 would be its star mail-boy. To differentiate itself, it really
only has to be silent (taken care of already) and power efficient.
|
Our Asus EN9400GT Silent sample.
|
At first glance the card has a relatively large heatsink (compared to the size
of the PCB) with a good basic design — plenty of surface area for heat
dissipation. We should note at this point that although the card's specifications
list a HDMI port, the sample we received had a standard TV-out port instead.
We suspect that it was simply an early review sample, and that the retail version
does have a HDMI port included on the backpane
|
Technical specifications according to GPU-Z.
|
Our sample was manufactured using a 65nm process, based on nVidia's G96 core.
As an entry level card it has only 16 stream processors, a 128-bit memory interface
and relatively slow (400MHz) GDDR2 memory.
| Help support this site, buy from one of our affiliate retailers! |
|
