Palicomp Touch Diamond review

The unstoppable smartphone market has seen touchscreens go mainstream, but when it comes to PCs they generally only come on all-in-one devices. We were therefore surprised to see a touchscreen monitor arrive with Palicomp’s latest PC, the Touch Diamond.

The monitor is AOC’s E2239FWT, and it comes with a 22in diagonal and a 1,920 x 1,080 native resolution. The extra interactivity is somewhat wasted on Windows 7, with Microsoft’s Touch Pack the only prod-specific software included, but you could argue it’s an early way to future-proof your new PC against Windows 8. And there’s no denying the AOC’s touch layer works well: it’s accurate and responsive.

That touch layer necessarily adds a little grain to the panel, and it’s glossy too, but underneath there’s a good quality TFT, every bit as good as the LG Flatron IPS screen we saw with the Chillblast Fusion Flash. Both monitors delivered mediocre brightness just below 200cd/m2, but the AOC’s impressive black level made for a measured contrast ratio of 989:1 – better than the Chillblast’s 731:1, and resulting in deep, punchy images. The average Delta E of 3.1 is good, too, a fact backed up the screen’s consistently accurate colours in our real-world tests.

There’s clearly enough graphical power inside the Touch Diamond to handle the Touch Pack applications and plenty more besides. The overclocked AMD Radeon HD 6970 runs its core clock at 950MHz rather than the usual 880MHz, and it delivered a comprehensive battering to our benchmarks.

Its average of 57fps in our Very High quality 1,920 x 1,080 Crysis benchmark is 4fps higher than the Chillblast, for instance, which included a stock-speed version of the same card. It proved capable at higher resolutions, too, with a playable average of 33fps at 2,560 x 1,600.

Processing power comes from an overclocked Core i5-2500K, which here runs at 4.8GHz. It’s enough to see the Palicomp return an overall benchmark score of 1.18 – one of the best scores we’ve seen from this mid-range processor.

The rest of the specification comprises 8GB of RAM and a Blu-ray drive. Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is loaded onto one the best SSDs around – OCZ’s 120GB Vertex 3 – with 93GB given over to OS storage and 19GB used as an ISRT cache to boost performance with the additional 2TB Seagate hard disk. Large file SSD write and read speeds of 399.9MB/sec and 298.8MB/sec are solid, although not as fast as the SSD in the Chillblast.