SUMA Goes RADEON 9500 and 9500 PRO!

by Anton Shilov
04/04/2003 | 03:59 AM

SUMA, a well-known supplier of NVIDIA GeForce-based retail graphics cards apparently started to sell ATI RADEON powered solutions as well. A Korean web-site Dark Crow reports that recently SUMA announced its PLATINUM RADEON 9500 product that will soon appear in local retail.

Besides PLATINUM RADEON 9500, SUMA also offers graphics cards based on the RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9100 graphics processors. “Powered by ATI” graphics cards from SUMA resemble ATI’s own solutions both in terms of PCB design as well as by bundled software and adapters. The cards also run at frequencies recommended by ATI itself. You can find more details about product lineup at SUMA’s web-site over here.

SUMA sells quite a lot of computer hardware in South-Korea including mainboards and  speakers, though, the company’s brand-name is mostly known for its NVIDIA-based graphics cards almost all around the world. Furthermore, SUMA is one of NVIDIA’s  partners who used to manufacture only NVIDIA-based graphics cards in the past. As a result, the introduction of Powered by ATI products may also eventually affect NVIDIA’s sales (just like it happened with MSI, see this and this news-stories), but unfortunately I cannot tell you if the impact is serious or not.

SUMA is not the first company to go with both ATI and NVIDIA. Recently MSI started to make the so-called RADEON 9600 TX graphics cards for its European partner Medion. Asian subsidiary of Creative Labs also started to sell Powered by ATI solutions last Summer (see this news-story), while Club3D company even does not restrict itself with ATI and NVIDIA, but also has SiS-based graphics cards in its lineup. I also can figure out a company or two who supply graphics cards on graphics chips from both leading GPU-companies, but the majority of manufacturers these days go with only one chip-developer. The trend started by Club3D, Creative Labs, SUMA and MSI may eventually entail other graphics cards vendors to utilise both NVIDIA and ATI GPUs in their product lines.