Introduction

When buying a new card, users nowadays have plenty of choice. A gamer looking for a high-end card will undoubtedly look at one of the GeForce 8800 cards. How about people who don’t care much for high resolutions and only want to game at 1280x1024, or perhaps not to game at all?

Their choices range from the incredibly cheap nVidia GeForce 8400 and AMD HD2400 cards to the more powerful GeForce 8600 and AMD HD2600 cards. Each has its advantages, so choosing the right one can be quite a challenge.

We have previously pitted the 8400 cards again the HD2400 and the 8600 against the HD2600. While these reviews delivered plenty of information to people who already settled on a price range and were only looking for which card to get from that segment, they didn’t offer much to users who were unsure which price range was right for them.

To help such users we decided to look at how the different middle and low-end boards from nVidia compared to each other. To top it off, all of the cards on test today are passively cooled, making them all prime candidates for multimedia PCs.