Totally not named after the Zone Troopers from C&C3.
Budget cards and passive cooling go together like macaroni and cheese, gin and tonic, meat and potatoes - the list goes on. This card is very similar to the Zotac 9400GT, but with a few key (and very useful) changes.
Sure, the core is the same g96, but this has twice the stream processors, has GDDR3 memory with a much higher bandwidth, the same bus and a practically identical PCB. The difference is so small that you can't really tell the two apart without knowing what you were looking for (though the yellow sticker on the black anodised bracket does help somewhat).
Thankfully Zotac have actually granted us access to the SLI tab, so it's possible to run two of these if you'd like to get some slightly faster silent action - just don't expect a miraculous increase. The cooler is the same as well, and idles at 68 degrees, 72 load without active cooling. With a fan this drops to 40 idle, and 44 load - very nice indeed. If you're feeling particularly adventurous (and have good airflow) you can bump this up nicely, overclocking it to give a little performance boost.
While this is a passively cooled card, the 4-pin PWM header is still present, so it's entirely possible to jerry-rig a cheap PWM fan to this connector, and cable-tie it to the card, so that you can control the fan speed via a program like Rivatuner - you can have your cake, and eat it too!
Gaming performance was a bit choppy, but turn some settings down and you'll find yourself with a very decent experience - with no extra noise! This is a very good choice for a media PC, or even for those silent computing purists who would like to play games every now and then, and is certainly worth the extra four dollars over the Zotac 9400GT.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012