PNY Geforce 8400GS / 512MB / PCI / Graphics Card

i have brought this gift for my friend's computer and it runs so smooth and the video graphic is fantastic the water effect shines when i played farcry and the clouds look so real that i couldnt stop playing. i highly recommend high gamers with a low spec to purchase this graphic card unless your computer is old with PCI then go for it. its the cheapest sale and a good bargain for all high gamers.

I'am one of those PC users that has a relatively old motherboard that sadly doesn't have PCI-Express expansion slots unlike alot of the new PC systems available today.

I was running out of ideas, maybe get a new system that supports PCI-E or find a graphics card that works with PCI, and it was a difficult search until I reached Play.com who had the now redundant PCI graphics card available to order.

Upon recieving the graphics card I was disappointed with the packaging as it was shipped in a cheap thin grey postage pack/bag and could of been easily damaged through depatch, thankfully it wasn't yet I couldn't get my head round the delivery solution that was made to allow such a flimsy form of packaging in the first place!

Apart from that, the graphics card was easily to setup, just gently plug it into a spare PCI expansion slot and away you go, install the necessary nVidia drivers and your rocking.

The potential of this graphics card is staggering, it will play alot of games that are new and those that are old yet require more graphical power.
I set the settings to high on San Andreas, maximum (highest) on Trackmania, and the low on Euro Truck Simulator just to name a few games that love this new toy installed on the system.

It DOES struggle with a few games that require a better graphics card, it WILL struggle with alot of high detailed games available to date and ITS NOT the best option for all-out gaming heaven.

However, if you need to get rid of that useless integrated graphics chip installed on your decripid motherboard like I did, this is the best path to chose and will lead you to a far superior graphical world.

All in all a GREAT buy, worth every penny and does the job perfectly. Shame about the packaging but you can't win 'em all!

My poor old Dell Dimension 2400 recently got a little upgrade to a 3.06ghz cpu, then the Radeon 9250 256mb card I had in there for a few years started to sound like a washing machine and started throwing artefacts up all the time on the most simple games (Old H1tman game , 3d poker online game etc...) so I binned it and ordered this (for £34 actually, the price has gone up since). I had ATI tool running on the old card, not sure if it is because the card was up the spout or whether it is just the performance difference, but its more than twice the performance. Now this is a PCI card so it is not going to turn your old PC into a hardcore gaming machine. But if you have to replace your PCI graphics and don't have AGP or PCI-Ex, then this card seems to be a the best bet. It beats the granny out of the 9250 as far as I can tell and can be overclocked easily apparently too. The heatsink doesn't look particularly effective but its fan cooled so should be ok. It is pretty quiet despite this fan, not silent but miles better than the washing machine i had though so I am happy. On the downside I did try running a 720p encoded film and although better, it was not amazing viewing experience to say the least. I only have a 1gb of ram, maybe 2gb would help and maybe this would be fine running an actual blu-ray disc in a blu-ray drive but I would not know. maybe this setup is never going to handle those things.

In Summary: Need a PCI card and not going to be demanding too much of your PC? Buy this one. Want to go HD and hardcore gaming but only got a PCI slot, save your money and buy a newer PC / MoBo.

does anyone know if you need a special PCI connection for this to work? my computer has 3 PCI connectors but i don't know if they are the correct ones for this card to work, is there a difference between PCI and PCI-express? please help if you can.

By far, specially if your machine is as 'old' as mine and are unable to use PCI Express. Works great and the price is excellent. Could not be happier.