Nvidia 8400GS overclocking: From (GPU/MEM) 450/400 to 580/480 - 11/01/2009 by Andrew
This card is one of the cheapest you can find from the green camp, hitting your wallet to the tune of AUD$35. This means that this card will generally be purchased to either provide a DVI connection to an LCD or for the simple fact that it's cheap and the purchaser isn't planning on gaming, CUDA or any type of 3D performance.
I fitted in to the first one; I needed a DVI connection to my LCD as analogue just doesn't cut it. As this card is worth next to nothing, there's no fear in melting it with overclocking so I thought, how far can you push the cheapest Direct X 10.0 card on the market?
Using the Linux overclocking techniques I recently posted, I decided to take it slow, making sure I don't burn the poor thing out on the first run. From stock, the GPU weighs in at 450Mhz (though this Gigabyte one packs 459Mhz) and DDR2 memory at 400Mhz (800Mhz effective). Since these overclocks are all happening under Ubuntu 8.10, you won't see any pretty Crysis graphics or comparisons to other cards - I don't have the time, hardware or patiences (or pay check) to go super in-depth.
Before I started anything, I invested in a 60mm fan that sits atop the 8400GS's heatsink. This card (Gigabyte) is passive so I was thinking I'll get some good results by adding a fan. Did I ever. Temps dropped from 80 degrees (centigrade) to 50 degrees, and under load stayed in the 50's. I took the GPU to 500 and the memory to 420 and re-ran Nexuiz for a good 30 minutes of 1680x1050 fraggin'. All was well, no visual problems and I picked up a handful of frames per second, though nothing to make me turn up any settings.
Going to 550/450 I again loaded up Nexuiz, though this time I did turn up the settings to make use of the new mumbo I was getting out of the card. 30 minutes in, no visual problems, GPU not getting above 60 degrees.
I decided to go a bit nuts and I took the card to 580/500, though nvclock didn't like having the memory set to 500Mhz (it accepted the setting, though double checking the speeds showed it didn't actually set the correct speed) so I reduced it down to 480Mhz and found that this card suddenly was boxing well above it's weight. I was able to run Nexuiz at much higher frames per second and with more detail than at stock. Previous to this experience, I wouldn't have ever bothered to play games using it, though the investment of a few hours tinkering (most of which were playing Nexuiz) I've turned at very low end, cheap card into something that can actually push out the pixels.
On the level 'Downer', 1024x768 windowed mode with 'Normal' effects selected I jumped from a 'just playable' 20 frames per second to a very playable 55 frames per second. This was a huge jump and really goes to show how crippled this card with it's 16 stream processors and 450/400 GPU/MEM speeds are. An overclock to 580/480 isn't small by any means though to be able to do this, gain more than double the frames per second and not need anything more than adding a fan to the heat sink shows that the 8400GS can be made to perform.