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NVIDIA T400

NVIDIA T400: Budget Graphics Card for Office and Basic Tasks

April 2025

Introduction

Entry-level graphics cards remain in demand among users who don’t require excessive performance but value energy efficiency and affordability. The NVIDIA T400, introduced in 2021, continues to be relevant in 2025 as a compact solution for office PCs, home media centers, and simple work tasks. Let’s explore what makes this model noteworthy and who it is suitable for.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Turing Architecture: A Legacy of the Past

The NVIDIA T400 is based on the Turing architecture, which made its debut in 2018. Despite its age, this platform is optimized for efficient performance in the budget segment. The card is manufactured using a 12nm process, ensuring a balance between performance and thermal output.

Lack of "Premium" Features

The T400 does not support ray tracing (RTX) or DLSS—these technologies are reserved for more expensive lines (GeForce RTX 40/50 series). However, it includes essential NVIDIA features like NVENC for hardware video encoding, which is useful for streaming and editing.

Key Specifications:

- 384 CUDA cores;

- Clock speed: 1230–1425 MHz (Boost).

2. Memory: Modest but Sufficient for Basic Tasks

GDDR6: Minimum for Starting Off

The graphics card is equipped with 2GB of GDDR6 memory with a 64-bit bus. The bandwidth is 80 GB/s. This is enough for running office applications, watching 4K videos, and playing less demanding games, but it may fall short for modern projects with HD textures.

Memory Features:

- Support for resolutions up to 7680×4320 (8K) via DisplayPort 1.4a;

- No support for GDDR6X or HBM memory—justified by the model’s price.

3. Gaming Performance: Only for Non-Demanding Projects

1080p: Comfortable on Low Settings

By 2025, the T400 will suit esports games and older titles:

- CS2: 90–110 FPS (low settings);

- Fortnite: 45–55 FPS (Low, without RT);

- GTA V: 60–70 FPS (Medium).

In AAA games released in recent years (such as Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty), the card delivers 20–25 FPS on minimum settings, which is unacceptable for comfortable gaming.

1440p and 4K: Not Recommended

Due to limited memory and a weak GPU, rendering at 2K/4K is impossible even in less demanding scenes.

4. Professional Tasks: Basic Capabilities

Video Editing and Rendering

Thanks to NVENC and support for CUDA (version 7.5), the T400 is capable of:

- Encoding H.264/H.265 in Premiere Pro;

- Simple 3D modeling in Blender (but rendering complex scenes may take hours).

Scientific Calculations

For tasks based on OpenCL/CUDA (e.g., MATLAB), the card is only suitable for educational purposes. Its performance is significantly inferior even to outdated Quadro models.

5. Power Consumption and Thermal Output: Quiet and Cool

TDP of 30W: Savings on Power Supply

The card does not require additional power—just a PCIe x16 slot. This makes it ideal for:

- Mini PCs (e.g., Dell OptiPlex Micro);

- Office builds with power supplies of 250–300W.

Cooling

Both passive (fanless) and active (with one cooler) versions are virtually silent. The maximum temperature under load is 65–70°C.

6. Comparison with Competitors

AMD Radeon RX 6400:

- Pros: 4GB GDDR6, higher gaming performance (~15–20%);

- Cons: Price $130–150 (compared to $100–120 for the T400).

Intel Arc A380:

- Pros: AV1 support, 6GB memory;

- Cons: Higher TDP (75W), driver issues with older software.

Conclusion: The T400 wins on price and energy efficiency but loses in gaming performance.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply: 300W is sufficient (e.g., Be Quiet! System Power 10).

Compatibility:

- Supports Windows 10/11, Linux (with open-source Nouveau drivers);

- Requires PCIe 3.0 x16.

Drivers:

- Regularly update the Studio Driver for work tasks;

- For gaming, use the Game Ready Driver (but do not expect optimizations for new releases in 2025).

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Low power consumption;

- Quiet operation;

- Support for multi-monitor configurations (up to 3 displays);

- Price: $100–120 (new models).

Cons:

- Only 2GB of memory;

- No support for RTX/DLSS;

- Weak performance in modern games.

9. Final Conclusion: Who is the T400 Suitable For?

The NVIDIA T400 is the choice for those seeking an affordable card for:

- Office PCs supporting 4K monitors;

- Home theaters (decoding AV1/HEVC);

- Basic video editing and 2D design;

- Non-demanding games (indie projects, retro gaming).

However, gamers and professionals should consider more powerful models, such as the RTX 3050 or AMD RX 6600. The T400 reminds us that even in the era of AI and realistic graphics, modest solutions still have a place.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

May 2021

Model Name

T400

Generation

Quadro

Base Clock

420MHz

Boost Clock

1425MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Transistors

4,700 million

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

12 nm

Architecture

Turing

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

2GB

Memory Type

GDDR6

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

64bit

Memory Clock

1250MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

80.00 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

22.80 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

34.20 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

2.189 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

34.20 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

1.072 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

SM Count

Multiple Streaming Processors (SPs), along with other resources, form a Streaming Multiprocessor (SM), which is also referred to as a GPU's major core. These additional resources include components such as warp schedulers, registers, and shared memory. The SM can be considered the heart of the GPU, similar to a CPU core, with registers and shared memory being scarce resources within the SM.

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

384

L1 Cache

64 KB (per SM)

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

30W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

OpenCL Version

3.0

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_1)

CUDA

7.5

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.6

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Suggested PSU

200W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

1.072 TFLOPS

3DMark Time Spy

Score

1420

Vulkan

Score

15891

OpenCL

Score

17024

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

FirePro M7820

1.142 +6.5%

Quadro K3100M

1.106 +3.2%

T400

1.072

NVS 810

1.037 -3.3%

Quadro 6000 SDI

1.007 -6.1%

3DMark Time Spy

Arc A550M

5182 +264.9%

Radeon RX 580 2048SP

3906 +175.1%

Radeon 780M

2755 +94%

GeForce GTX 1050

1769 +24.6%

T400

1420

Vulkan

Radeon Pro Vega II Duo

98446 +519.5%

Radeon RX 6700S

69708 +338.7%

Radeon RX 580 2048SP

40716 +156.2%

P106 090

18660 +17.4%

T400

15891

OpenCL

Radeon RX 6700S

62821 +269%

Radeon Pro 5300

38843 +128.2%

Radeon R9 M290X

21442 +26%

T400

17024

Radeon HD 5750

884 -94.8%