The most enviable part is the price

This we know: Windows 8 is more usable with a touchscreen, plain and simple. Whether that’s a practical scenario for tower-and-monitor setups is arguable, but it turns out that using touch on a laptop comes pretty naturally—even more so than we expected.

Note: This feature originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of the magazine.

Takes SSD caching to a whole new level

It’s tough to wrap your head around HighPoint’s RocketCache, so we’ll try to sum it up as being simply crazy performance, if you’re willing to deal with the configuration hassles.

The RocketCache is a x8 PCIe 2.0 card that lets you connect up to four SATA devices to it via a Medusa-like cable with four SATA 6Gb/s connectors on it. The card lets you run two HDDs with two SSDs for caching, or—more crazy—one HDD with three SSDs for insane caching. That’s not all. You can select between maximum performance, maximum performance with cache protection, RAID 1 with two hard drives and two SSDs for caching speed (maximum performance and protection), and maximum protection, which is RAID 1 with cache written to disks. One important note is that this device is not bootable, which is very unfortunate.

Note: This review originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of the magazine. 

The sound card is back—but does your PC need one anymore?

If you think of your PC as a lifeboat full of components floating in the Atlantic Ocean after one of those ARM-based subs put two fish into the side of the PC’s troop transport, you can better understand the plight of the sound card.

Note: This review originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of the magazine.