Asus EN9400GT Silent Edition - star mail boy?

Is it just me or do others think that yellow DVI connectors are not sexy?

As un-sexy as a really not sexy thing.

XFX have green DVI connectors and Palit often uses red
Just what got into them?!

At any case that big block aka heatsink on the ASUS looks creepy, unnecessarily bulky and it seems as if ASUS' design department had a single day to make something useful.

At any case I once had a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285, which was passively cooled. Everything from a noise aspect was nice, but the heat of the graphics card quickly affected CPU temperature as well. After putting a small ultra noisy 40mm fan on the Quadro, the CPU temperature went down by 8C!!! Anyone else had same "success"?

I sometimes stay awake at night thinking how unsexy my beige DVI connector is. Then i release that not only is it A) hidden round the back of my PC and B) has a sexy black DVI cable hiding the offensive beige.

And suddenly coitus interruptus has an additional meaning.

Neat review. I've just installed another passive 9400 in my work PC, because Dell won't bring out certified drivers for the Q35 that will do OpenGL2.0 (under Windows XP, mind you).

Beige? Don't you mean white? White connectors are all good. Not as good as black but still they're pretty kickass.

Well its sort of creamy colour. Certainly not white.

Clearly SPCR needs an agony aunt ... I have two but they are both different colours. Is this normal?

don't you know beige is the new black?


Disappointing that it failed to do h264. Have you contacted asus about this? As this is built with the G96 chipset, it should have the latest PureVideo V3 included, so it should offload even more.

I'm looking at one of these for my encoding machine, as there are ways to offload the decoding of a h264 video to the card, so it skips the cpu, ppl have reported good speed differences. But this result is worrying.

Thanks for calculating power consumption, very important stuff. The trend toward high-energy usage is making me stay away from the new GPUs. Why can't they make a powerful video card that uses very little energy at idle? Like C&Q for video. I know they have "hybrid" but it relies on OS software, easy to blame the "drivers", I'd love to see it done in the GPU hardware. Also, do any of the silent cards you've reviewed have an unused fan header that can be used instead of a mobo header?

Well, some of the new Nvidia cards, such as GTX260/216 or GTS250 (and its "younger twin" 9800GTX+) have impressively low idle, and even full load, consumption, given their capabilities.

By the looks of that CPU usage for H.264, I think it wasn't using DXVA. Perhaps it was a driver bug. I'll assume it wasn't a setup bug on the test PC.