Today SUMA officially announced its first graphics card from the SIF family: PLATINUM GeFORCE2 MX SIF Type A. Just in case you forgot we would like to remind you that SIF means SUMA Individual analog Filter and represents a filter improving image quality and eliminating the blurring effect at higher resolutions. This filter is located on a daughter card.
The announced graphics card is equipped with Type A filter featuring an output port for one monitor. As far as other specs go, SUMA PLATINUM GeFORCE2 MX SIF Type A is a regular NVIDIA GeForce2 MX based graphics card with 32MB SDRAM working at 166MHz and a core working at 175MHz. The only remarkable thing about this product is a cooler made of transparent plastic, which adds a certain charm to the card.
Of course, thanks to such unique feature as SIF, the cards will cost somewhat higher than the regular GeForce2 MX based products. Well, let’s try to figure out how necessary the additional analog signals filtering is. There haven’t been any complaints yet about the image quality at higher resolutions provided by GeForce2 MX based graphics cards from brand name manufacturers. However, even if we assume signal filtering to be necessary, it is really doubtful that the filter located on the daughter card will be able to improve the situation. The thing is that the ordinary GeForce2 MX based cards also have the analog filter, however, SUMA claims that their solution is much better because placing the filter onto the daughter card allowed to reduce the EMI influence and to make the filter closer to video-Out. To tell the truth, this doesn’t sound convincing at all.
The EMI influence on the daughter card is lower, for sure. However, the analog signal quality may turn out worse because the signal goes through the additional output. That’s why the first SUMA’s statement can be argued about. As for the second part of this statement saying that the filter appears closer to the output, it is correct. But we don’t really think that moving the filter to a different place may have any real effect on the image quality, especially since there is also a D-Sub cable on the way. So, this SIF looks much more like a pure marketing trick and a reason to increase the graphics cards cost and not like a useful technology.
And now please be attentive: SUMA is going to offer 4 types of graphics cards with SIF filters:

• Type A – with 1 D-Sub Out;
• Type B – with 2 D-Sub Outs for cards supporting TwinView technology;
• Type C – with a regular monitor-Out and DFP-Out;
• Type D – with BNC-Out.

Well, SIF Type D seems to be the only really useful thing: this daughter card will allow connecting monitors to the GeForce2 MX card via BNC. It may improve the image quality. However all the other SIFs do not make much sense for the reasons mentioned above. The coolest thing of these four is SIF Type C, of course, where SUMA decided to apply the analog filter to a digital DFP-Out. :-) All in all, there is hardly anything new you can expect from SIF.