Suma - No TV For You!
Suma's cards are real lookers, and the Korean company ships them in transparent containers. This guarantees them a special status on any retail shelf. Unfortunately, that special status also extends to another aspect of the cards: that is, they stink - literally. The packing material gives off a very unpleasant and biting odor. Suma sent us a GeForce2 Ti and a GeForce3 Ti200 board for this review.
An overview of the card and its features:
| Graphics Card | Hardware | Software |
|---|---|---|
| Suma Platinum GeForce2 Ti | GeForce2 Ti: 250 MHz64 MB, 4 ns, 400 MHzGPU FanMemory HeatsinksTV-Out (CH7008A-T)DVI | Driver-CD |
| Suma Platinum GeForce3 Ti200 | GeForce3 Ti200: 175 MHz64 MB, 4 ns, 400 MHzGPU FanMemory HeatsinksTV-Out (CH7008A-T)DVI | Driver-CD |
Both boards are colored a brownish-black hue. Memory and GPU are cooled by large, silvery heatsinks. Big silver letters on the board and stickers on the heatsink give detailed information about the board and its origin. Speaking of details, the receding edge of the Ti200 card is another nice touch, if you have a taste for such things. Both cards employ a Chrontel CH7008A-T as a TV-Out encoder chip, and a DVI output is also present. Sadly, the TV-Output refused to work correctly, no matter whether NVIDIA's current reference driver (v23.11) or Suma's own was used. The result on the GF2Ti was a strongly distorted image with rolling lines, while on the Ti200, the driver refused to recognize the Chrontel chip altogether! This renders the TV-Out function on both cards completely useless for now. Perhaps a newer driver will address this problem.
The software bundle is rather disappointing. At least SUMA thought to include some of NVIDIA's 3D tech-demos on the driver CD, but, other than the driver, there is no software to be found, not even a DVD player program. Yet even the drivers proved problematic. The driver version v21.81, as shipped on the CD, recognized neither the GF2 Ti nor the Ti200, breaking off the installation with an error message.
The explanation is rather simple: the Titanium series is only supported starting with NVIDIA's driver release v21.83 - or v21.81, with some modifications to the INF file. It looks like SUMA forgot to make these modifications, though. Apparently, SUMA still needs to learn the importance of quality assurance and product testing.
