Gigabyte GV-N84S-512I GeForce 8400GS 512 MB ATX HDMI Graphics Card

I was looking for a cheap PCIe graphics card to upgrade from the onboard graphics of my 3 Ghz, Pentium 4 motherboard. I was apprehensive, owing to potential overheating problems, of buying second-hand, so decided to go for something new and cheap. As a 63 year-old pensioner, cost was a big factor. I run Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) and do not play games, so I only wanted a graphics card that would smooth out and sharpen the full-screen displays of online TV programs on my LCD monitor. The card arrived quickly, was well-packaged and easy to install. The fan is very quiet.

Unfortunately I was deeply disappointed with the card's initial performance, using the generic Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu. Booting into Ubuntu was a nightmare - when it did boot, the screen would freeze after a couple of minutes. Sometimes the bios boot itself would hang before completing the POST. After several hours of frustration and repeated restarts I almost decided to return the card to Amazon.

As a last ditch attempt to get the card working I explored a link to the Nvidia home page and found there was a relatively new Linux driver for the card: NVIDIA-Linux-x86-280.13.run. I downloaded this, installed in terminal, using 'sudo apt-get install nvidia-current', restarted, then, in terminal: 'sudo nvidia-xconfig'. After a short time tweaking the screen resolution on the GUI, the card was fine. It now works perfectly and I am very impressed. My system is now stable, and boots smoothly into Ubuntu every time. My sensors show a GPU temperature when viewing video, of no more than 58 C. The latest Nvidia Linux driver apparently did the trick. Interestingly, my System Information shows a Video RAM of 1024 Mb (- twice that in the card's specification - so maybe there is some sharing going on with my 2Gb of installed RAM??). I haven't yet explored the HDMI functions, but am hopeful that they will operate OK with the new driver.

I upgraded a Dell Precison 380 to Windows 7 Professional and the installed ATI Fire GL V3100 could not wake up the screen on the DVI port. I searched Amazon bought this card because it was cheap! The initial install did not go well as the HD screen I was using went out of focus and made me feel sick. I then uninstalled all the drivers and replaced the card with the old one. When I put this Nvidia card back in again Windows 7 found the drivers and all was well. I would suggest you do NOT use the drivers that come on the supplied disk for Windows 7 as something went awry.

Good card, does the job well, with very little fan noise, for editing HD video with Sony Vegas 10 under Win7 using two monitors - HDMI and DVI connected.

Didn't install the drivers and software from the supplied CD but let Windows find the latest drivers and software.

Audio over HDMI could be a problem if the necessary connections are not avaiable on the mobo or sound card due to a cable (supplied) that requires a suitable two pin S/PDIF output.

Edit:

Bought another of these cards for a XP machine in March 2012 and it performs really well - slightly different installation due to there not being a separate cable for audio over HDMI.