By now you know that you have a choice between the base Boxster and the Boxster S, between 245 and 295 horsepower, and between 0-60 times of 5.8 and 5.1 seconds, respectively. However, there are a few more differences, not least of which is the price: $46,395 for the base Boxster and $56,295 for the Boxster S (including $795 destination charge). The base model comes standard with a five-speed manual transmission that gets the job done, but when you’re spooling the car out over a really great road, you can’t help but wish there was one more gear, just a little more oomph. But, as we already noted, the sweet spot in the 2.7-liter engine is so big, a lot of the time we just left the shifter in third and let the engine do the work. This was especially true on the nearby Tail of the Dragon – a highway in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina with 318 turns in its 11-mile length. The hairpins and cutbacks came so fast and furious we didn’t really have time to shift.

However, the six-speed manual that’s standard on the S is a sweet affair. Like all Porsche shifters, it’s as precise as the action on a well-oiled rifle and we appreciated the extra gear on the Cherohola, which has fewer turns and more time to work up and down the gears to indulge our Steve McQueen fantasies.

The five-speed Tiptronic S auto-manual transmission is available for both models ($3,210), making electronically perfect shifts via controls on the steering wheel much faster than we could ever hope to. We tried the Tiptronic in a loaded Boxster S and appreciated how it freed us to concentrate on steering and keeping the car on the road, but we weren’t crazy about how it took over shifting for us sometimes during less aggressive driving when we wanted to hold a gear and it wanted to go immediately to fifth or sixth. We also, perhaps because of our Steve McQueen delusions, think it’s more fun to have total control of a car like the Boxster. We loved Tiptronic when we drove the 2007 Porsche 911 Turbo, for example, because that car’s power is so prodigious we welcomed all the help we could get in controlling it.

Porsche says that Tiptronic works best when combined with the optional Sport Chrono Package ($920) because it shifts gears more quickly and holds gears longer against the redline limiter. It also reduces the intervention of the Porsche Stability Management (PSM – standard on all cars) to allow a little more wheel slippage, like when you’re accelerating out of a turn and the back end comes out a little bit and then snaps back when you stomp on the gas – way, way cool. The package also includes a stop watch in a binnacle on top of the dash that looks nifty, but we can’t imagine using it.