Robot lady gets the once over

THROUGH A LINK at HardOCP we were carried away to Robotsrule.com where a review of the Femisapien robot has been posted. Now don’t go getting all fetishistic on us, it’s a plain, innocent robotic product that happens to look a bit girlish and does stuff like dancing and bumping into objects. It (she?) doesn’t talk either, she goes “ooohhh” and “huummmm” in what the manufacturer calls “emotish”... hummmm... look at the little girl, here.

We've always been intrigued about the SD interface’s capabilities and the lack of devices that expand on PDAs and phones (and in this case, cameras). Well, the Tech Lounge provided us with a review of the Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card, a memory card and 802.11g wireless card-in-one. Stick it in your camera, take lots of photos and then transfer them wirelessly to your PC. At 10MB/s speeds it’s speedy enough to handle most photos but, there is a caveat, though: it only supports JPG. Still, if you work with laptops or couldn’t bother to buy a card reader... it’s useful and clever. Read it here.

Bertie at Tom’s Hardware has measured some good numbers off the Intel Atom that’s currently under test at their lab. Instead of the Intel-designed mobo 945GCLT mobo, they’re using an ECS 945GCT-D (still no DVI connector, but it manages 1 PCIe x1 slot). Overclocking, as you can imagine, is a big no-no with this combination of hardware and software. Bert measured the lowest desktop consumption ever for a lab test, but no amount of Hyper-threading will help you when running multiple apps. Things get better under XP or Linux, but still... Bert has no problems in banning the thing from office use.

Shane, Tweak Town’s resident graphics geek, has completed his tests on Palit’s overclocked 9800GT (ie: Sonic). No matter what you’ve got on the market, it’s always cool to put out a card that’ll overtake it’s most direct competitor (HD 4850) out of the box, but even though Shane rated it great value, we didn’t catch the price in the article... and everything comes down to price/performance when we look at the mainstream offers. Check out Nvidia’s latest, right here.

Legit Reviews has a review of Gigabyte’s new X48-DS5 motherboard. It’s a good all-rounder board, excelling at some tasks, but being just “good” at most. It overclocked well and it’ll save you a buck on memory (as it uses DDR2). However, Jason isn’t absolutely sure about the pricing, ‘cos the one he got hold of will “send chills down your spine”: $355. Egad, that’s expensive, even for an X48. Read about it here.

Hardware Zone has their first official look at the AMD Puma platform. The platform introduces several power-saving features to the AMD world of notebooks, including hybrid graphics, PowerXpress and surround graphics. Acer and HP seem to be the launch partners at the moment, at least in Singapore. Give it a read, you’ll see some interesting stuff.

Anandtechies have been fiddling with Foxconn’s latest mobo, the Black Ops. Definitely an enthusiast mobo – it already holds several world records according to Rajinder. The Black Ops features chipset waterblocks for improved cooling/stability and a BIOS to match the overclocking/benchmarking target. Get it here. µ