EVGA 512-P2-N738-LR GeForce 8400 GS 512MB DDR2 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Comment: I had these for over a year now and they seem to hold up well.

Comment: This EVGA PCI-E 1.0 GeForce 8400 GS 512MB DDR2 from NVIDIA was the Video Card I was looking for and I finally received it for $28.04 Dollars from James Chong of Richardson, Texas. The problem with this order is that Mr. Chong accidently Credited my account at the time of my purchase in January 2010. Since then, both he and I was trying to have Amazon's Billing Department Credit Mr. Chong for my purchase, but it has taken more than two Months to even try to get this effort accomplished! Mind you, this is after my Amazon Account had been charged for the item, but Mr. Chong, the seller, still have not received the Credit due to him because the Billing Department kept giving he and I the run-around about this purchase I made and I paid for in full, as it was shown on my last Billing Statement!
Both Mr. Chong and I have contacted Amazon's Billing Department on several occasions, but as far as I know, this issue is Not yet resolved as Mr. Chong is still waiting to be Credited for selling his item!!
This puts Amazon's Billing Department in a very bad light and will cause it a great deal of harm on both the Merchants' and the Buyers' sides as it is now obvious that Amazon's Billing Departmenet is run by incompetant fools who Do not know how to Credit a Merchant's account for a single purchase after 3 Months!!
Best Regards, Steve Horvath, Chicago, IL

Comment: I bought this GeForce 8400 card so that my son could run his new Sims 3 game on our PC. The card installation was pretty simple. My PC's BIOS settings automatically changed for my primary display adapter from "On board" to "PCI", rather than "PCI Express", though. After the card installation, our PC still did not run my son's Sims 3 game properly, though.

I manually changed the PC BIOS setting to PCI Express for the primary display adapter, but Sims 3 still didn't work properly. I then updated the GeForce 8400 drivers to the most recent I could find on the Internet (January 2010), and the game advanced a little farther, but still didn't work. I updated DirectX to the most recent I could find, but still the Sims 3 game wouldn't work.

On the positive side, my RealFlight 3.5 R/C flight simulator works well with the new card, and the 3D flying fields which were too slow to use with the on-board ATI Radeon Express chip work well with the new card. Other PC programs (Other than Sims 3) seem to work OK with the new card, too. At this point, I think the problem is with the Sims 3 game. This really takes me back to the bad-ole-days of PC gaming from 10 or 20 years ago....

Overall, this card appears to have decent graphics engine power for the money, so I can't holler much about it. The fan noise is apparent at times, but it's not terribly obtrusive. My standard power supply supports the new video card and the additional terabyte hard drive I added, so the card must not pull too much power either.

I will most likely avoid PC-based games for my son in the future, and focus on games for his PS3. At least they work when you buy them.

Larry

Comment: I recently picked one of these up from Amazon here, and put it in my eMachines desktop. Let me say it makes a WORLD of difference.

Simply put, here are the numbers from Windows 7 Experience score.

Desktop Performance for Aero. Onboard Video - 3.5 With this card - 3.7 (with latest drivers!)

3D Business and gaming graphic performance. Onboard Video - 3.2 With this card - 5.3 Thats a huge difference!

Pros,
Easy to install. I've heard horror stories of people having to find drivers for this card. I installed it, turned on my system and Windows 7 did everything for me. Installed the latest drivers AND removed the original videos drivers. Nothing to it.

Cons,
As stated in other reviews this sucker is loud. I wasn't ever able to hear my computer running before, but now I can hear it from a good six feet away.

All in all I would rate this card 4 out of 5 stars. If it was a little bit more quiet it would be a 5* for sure. Easy to install, and for most people 512MB of DDR2 ram is enough. For example, I am able to play the Ghostbusters Video Game with this card.. and you can ask any PC gamer how image intensive that game is.

This card is a winner! A loud winner, but a winner never less!

Comment: This isn't going to be a great card for intensive gaming. It will however do a nice job powering your computer during normal use. Some of my DVD authoring software uses the card directly to process data and it seems to run at a reasonable rate. One thing I like about this card is that it's not the heat pump some of higher level cards are. I had a GeForce 9600 for a while and the thing was a bloody heat pump. I don't have air conditioning in my place, so I was worried about overheating and finally gave up on it.

Windows Vista gives mine a 3.5 rating for the Aero desktop. It scores higher on the gaming benchmarks at 4.1. Again though, it's not going to be super fast on intensive games. If this card is meant for any gamer it's for the semi-casual gamer or someone who plays older titles. I have absolutely no regrets about purchasing this card. It's been running perfectly for probably a year now and other than the fan making a little noise at start up it's quiet and I have no reason to notice it. It's nice to be able to run two monitors off of it, vga or dvi. I haven't tried, but I think you can run two of the same type of connection, if you have an adapter.

Depending on the power supply in your computer, you might want to upgrade that before you buy any card. It's always good practice because computer manufacturers will give you the lowest possible one they can. Upgrading the supply may seem like a hassle, but a general rule of thumb is the more power it can supply, the cooler and more efficient it is, especially if you don't use it's full capacity. Changing supplies is generally a pretty simple job to do yourself and if you get a good enough quality one like a Antec brand power supply, you might actually make up the money in energy savings over the life of the machine. You don't have to care about the environment to like a cooler machine and lower power bills.