nVidia 8400m GS

I recently bought a laptop and before it ships I have been looking around at how the 8400m GS performs. The video card is labeled at 128 mb but many people have been posting on forums about how they're cards are telling them they have 256mb instead of 128.

More commonly, Youtube videos are all titled 8400m GS *256*. Is the 128mb version just really uncommon? Or is it really 256 mb. I also stumbled upon something called Turbo Cache (not sure if that's the right name for it) that has the GPU use some of my systems RAM...Isn't that what integrated chipsets do?

Anyway here's my system:

XPS M1530 Laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T8100 (2.1GHz/800Mhz FSB, 3MB Cache)

3 GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz (2 DIMMs)

320 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)

128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS

If anyone knows anything about Turbo Cache or how this card performs with World of Warcraft that would be great. Thanks

 

Yep, you can able to play WOW at mid or high setting on 8400gs.

 

Any certain numbers with that? Maybe high settings with 50+ fps or something?

 

I'm guessing it's got 128MB of dedicated ram and another 128 MB of shared system ram (turbo cache), for a total of 256MB of ram.

Frame rates would depend on screen resolution and graphics settings.

 

Anyone else have thoughts or advice on this?

 

the graphic card got 128MB of dedicated memory and it supports TurboCache, which allows the use of system RAM for video memory. The graphic card allows me to play BF2 at high settings, no AA@1024x768, Far Cry, high settings, no AA@1024x768, UT3 at medium settings, no AA@1280x800

I think you'd be able to play WoW without any problems with the card, though I would suggest you get the 8600 card, since your laptop supports that card, and it will give you a nice boost in performace, vis a vis the 8400.

 

Alas I was very aware of the 8600 GT card, but was unable to buy it for reasons I won't discuss, so now I'm wondering whether or not I can upgrade the XPS's GPU in the future. There have been posts here saying that with XPSs you can, but can I do so with the 8600?

 

the 1530 you can not upgrade. The chip is on the motherboard.

 

I am playing WoW on the 128M 8400M GS card in my Vostro (different machine but same GPU - specs in sig)

My settings to get an average of 50-60fps (In all the WotLK areas especially) are I have shaders turned off - not worth the effort with this card, 24x24x1Multisampling, Triple Buffer is on, I turned of death effects and glow effect, weather density is at the lowest setting same with specualr lighting, I left distance at medium and I play at the native resolution of 1280x800.

I have a few more things tweaked in my file, but I am getting good performance with not too much in the way of noticable graphics changes. It doesn't run as good as my desktop with a 9600GT in it where I can max everything out, but its a lot better than intergrated!

I can alos hook my Vostro up to my 22" Dell monitor and play at 1280x800 on that with no worries as well

 

Thanks geekygirl xD. Glad to finnaly someone's firsthand experience with WoW's performance on the 8400m GS. If your getting 50-60 FPS with the visual settings you named, do you think I can still expect 50+ FPS with glow effects on? The glow is what makes the game look nice for me =)

 

If you can cancel your order I would advise you to do so.
I own an XPS M1330 and it has the 8400M GS GPU.
While I find no fault with any of the information in this thread, including the performance specs, I would strongly advise you to avoid these GPU's.
The problem is that these GPU's fail and are arguably all faulty.
Just take a look at this forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=204772 there are over 100 pages of posts. I also encountered the exact same failure. Luckily for me my laptop was still under warranty.
nVidia isn't stepping up and accepting blame for the failure of these GPU's - they are pointing fingers at everyone else. In the mean time, faulty nVidia GPU's have now hit the macbook market.
For what it's worth, I used to play 3D mmorpg's on my laptop and it works just fine. However now I will never do that again since my feeling is that the GPU will fail again - it's not a question of if but when for me.
Look at this forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=314949

theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/09/nvidia-g84-g86-bad

Finally, please read the paragraph entitled "Defective mobile video adapters" in the following wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVidia

This is a serious problem. I am seriously considering selling this laptop before it fails again.
[1] since this is my first post i cannot post urls

 

I would be more interested in the how the warranty returns figures for GPU failure compare over the last 2 years for notebooks with these GPU's compared to the actual sales figures....that would give a much clearer insight into the GPU failure rate instead of something taken as gospel from the internet..

I look at it this way, not everyone out there has had issues with it, its most likely that a more than usual amount of people are having troubles (ie yes there is a problem as their failure rate is higher than what would be considered normal and this is attributed to a manufacturing problem), but not every single person that ever operated a notebook with an 8400M in it is having the same issues.

Personally I will be happy if this 8400M lasts a year, I usually update every 12 months or so. Besides its not exactly what I would call a high end card in a high end machine so guess I don't expect as much (the Vostro i am talking about - and so far it has a better heating solution than the XPS with my GPU running no where near the temps being reported in the XPS)

Besides thats what warranty's and RMA's are for, but yes I agree it is something you should be mindful of - nothiong worse than a bunch of people on the internet saying "I told you so!!"...lol

But I digress, getting back to the OP, for the in-game glow in WoW, I have mine turned off - I prefer performance over pretty, especially for PvP, but if you don't mind a slight performance knock you should be able to run it.

 

I agree this is OT but I would argue that spending one or two thousand dollars on a (at the time) cutting-edge laptop, one should expect that the hardware would last *indefinitely*, at least in terms of usability. Sure things get out-dated and old, but my wife's ancient Dell CSx laptop works day in and day out, no questions. She laughed when my fancy new laptop died after I just told her to upgrade her junky old laptop.
There have been some discussions lately on "beta culture". This laptop and GPU (as well as macbooks) seem to fit into this category.

Back to the original post, this laptop will perform adequately for 3D mmorpg's that use DirectX. It's not top-of-the-line, but hey, it's a laptop, and slim and sleek to boot! Have you seen the XPS gaming laptops? Holy cow they are huge.

 

The 8400 GS failure issue is one which i can argue against. Although many people do have the problem of their nvidia card failing, I think a lot of it has to do with how one takes care of the system, i.e. letting it run extremely hot regardless of the notebook obviously overworking itself, and not getting some kind of cooler, ect. I have had my 8400 GS for half a year now, and i am extremely satisfied with it, its really light weight, performance is great, and no problems with it so far.

As for your WoW question, i do play WoW, and I would say the 8400 is a good card to play on low to medium settings. The FPS on my native resolution on low settings is anywhere from 60-100. On medium, it hangs around 50, but there are times when it does crawl to 30 or even a bit lower in areas where there is lots of people. Of course i can run the game on all maxed out settings except for AA, but if you plan to do a raid or anything where there are lots of people on the screen, prepare to lag.

I believe the 8400 GS that dell ships is the 128 MB version, there is a 256 MB version out there but i dont think dell offers it. My card has 1902MB of memory because of turbocache which uses system ram as memory for the card.

If you want good performance and quality graphics, stay away from the 8400, and get the 8600 instead.

 

Thanks for the advice all. I'm getting the 8400m GS in the Dell XPS M1530. For me, this is a huge step. I mean gigantic. For 10 years I have been using a Compaq Presario with 128 mb of RAM and a horrible nVidia GeForce FX5500 card. Don't ask why i've had that computer for that long but I'll be quite happy with what the 8400m GS has to offer. I also only spent $800.00 (That's with shipping and tax xD) on the laptop because I got it from the Dell Outlet site, so it's a refurbished laptop.

Here's the system:

Memory
3 GB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz (2 DIMMs)

Hard Disk Drive
320 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)

Video
128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS

Base
XPS M1530 Laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T8100 (2.1GHz/800Mhz FSB, 3MB Cache)

So back at you xgm541, do you think that the laptop I have is more powerful than yours? So I might be able to pull off max settings in WoW a little smoother? I'm just not sure about where the bottle neck of my system's performance will be at. I'm guessing it's the 8400...

 

Well no, your laptop wont be more powerful than mine, my 1330 specs are

4 GB ram
200 GB 7200 RPM HD
128 MB nvidia 8400m gs
T8300 2.4 ghz

and in gaming, yes, the bottleneck will be the video card.

 

With an M1530 + light gaming you should really aim to get an 8600GT

 

I have taken care of my notebook and even applied the copper mod a few months ago.

Now after 9+ months ownership, I believe it is on the cusp of failure, with severely degraded/unusable 3d graphics, 'display driver not responding' messages, blank screens, and artifacts (coloured blocks) at times.

 

No offence but this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

You've purchased a laptop (and not a cheap one either) It should be capable of keeping itself cold and not require external cooling.

The overheating issue lies purely with dell's poor cooling design, and to be expected to lug an extra cooling system around to compensate for this, as well as only using the laptop lightly so that it won't be overstessed is laughable.

 

Hmm well is there a cap point where World of Warcraft doesn't need that much CPU usage or RAM, making our systems run the game pretty much the same except for places with a lot more people?

Hope you can understand that, i'm not sure how to explain it very well =\

 

Not really. Mine failed and I don't even game with it. It doesn't usually overwork, as most things I do are only related to office applications and internet browsing. Also, Nvidia has already confirmed that their chips are faulty. Plus, if you do the copper mod, you can see how the temps lower a lot. So yeah, I don't think the problem is that much related to how the user treats it. Come on, the system runs hot with just notepad open lol

Well, that may explain it. Most GPUs start to fail after the 6 months mark.