The front of the card is dominated by the big passive heatsink while the back has nothing important to note other than the eight memory chips. Due to the design of the heatsink the card uses a tiny bit more than one slot. An empty slot below the card is strongly recommended to ensure enough airflow around the heatsink. The card has one DVI port and one analog display connector. Point of View uses a big passive cooler without fan. Its large surface area dissipates the little heat that is generated by the G96 chipset easily, even without much air flow around the graphics card will do the trick and keep the card running just fine.

Even though SLI is possible on all GeForce 9400 GT products, it does not make much sense in our opinion, better get a more powerful card in the first place. An external power connector is not needed, as the card will draw all its power from the PCI Express bus. The final overclocks of our card are 691MHz core and 848MHz memory. That’s one amazing overclock. NVIDIA’s same G96 chip is also used on the GeForce 9500 GT where it is running at a higher clock speed. It also looks like the DDR2 memory has some headroom left too, which isn’t hard given the lousy default clock of 666MHz, but it still remains low-end memory.

When looking at NVIDIA’s new GeForce 9400 GT for the first time it looks pretty good. The G96 chipset, the 512MB or 1GB of memory, passively cooled, no external power connector required. Unfortunately the whole card turned out to be too slow to be used for anything other than most basic gaming. Given the price there are many alternatives available for just a few dollars more which will give you double or triple the gaming performance. The 1GB of DDR2 memory may sound useful to the novice, but in reality it does not make any difference if the card has 256MB of video memory. In the end it rarely will use more.

As soon as you crank up the resolution the missing shading power of the card results in unplayable frame rates. The Point of View GeForce 9400 GT with its passive heatsink and the Wall·E packaging can certainly improve on the product, but we’re not sure if that is enough. If you are looking for a media PC card which does only video playback without gaming, the Radeon HD 3450 is certainly the better price to performance choice. For gaming, the GeForce 9600 GT is at a price point that is so low that any other card can’t even remotely compete.