Last month PC Express got it very right with its choice of components and the Phoenix 1550A deservedly won its place on the A List as our high end machine of choice. However, it didn’t take long to realise that it had some serious competition this month from both Scorptec and Trinity International’s $4000 beasts.

While the Stinger’s case isn’t the most glamorous, it’s not ugly and its front door closes to hide the power switches and disc drives – keeping things tidy. But turning it on produced a veritable treat – it’s almost totally silent. You have to be in a very quiet room indeed to even hear the power supply, CPU cooler and 120mm exhaust fan and even then it won’t be distracting.

This is all the more remarkable considering the components used within. The CPU is a dual core Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and it’s flanked by 1GB of speedy Corsair TwinX PC3200 memory and two 250GB WD 7200rpm hard disks (with 16MB buffers) running in RAID 0. This all combined to score an impressive 1.13 in our new benchmarks. Even if you’re into the heaviest encoding and multitasking it will suit your needs very well.

The hard disks combine to generate 465GB of storage space which all but the most ardent video hoarders will be able to fill quickly. If that sounds too low then you’ll like the extra space for three additional hard disks. Plus, each bay uses rubberised mounts to dampen noise and vibration. Note however, that there’s no intake fan and they get noticeably warmer than TI’s well-cooled system. But we liked the peace and quiet and found no stability faults with the Stinger.

It’s no slouch in 3D performance, either. Last month’s recommended, overclocked XFX 7800GTX graphics card is included and scored a massive 99fps in Half Life 2 and 62fps in our Far Cry tests. If things ever seem slow (way off) in the future, you can make use of the SLI motherboard by adding a second card.

There’s also space to add two more 5.25in drives and two external 3.5in drives – there’s no floppy. It amounts to a good use of space considering that it’s noticeably shorter than last month’s PC Express offering and TI’s $4000 competitor. The motherboard itself (Asus’ excellent A8N-SLI Premium – part of our standard Labs test rig) also offers spare 1x and 4x PCI-Express slots and two PCI slots. A third is taken up by a Creative Audigy 2 ZS sound card – a nice touch offering more audio options than typical onboard fittings.

Other connectivity options include two front mounted USB 2 ports – note the lack of audio and FireWire though. At the back there are six more USB 2 and three FireWire along with parallel and game ports and coaxial and optical S/PDIF out ports.

Other internal features include the same optical drives seen in both TI systems this month – an LG DVD-writer which offers 16x DVD+R, 6x dual layer DVD+R9 and DVD-RAM writing and a second DVD-ROM for disc-to-disc copying. But it’s on the outer peripherals that see Scorptec’s system start to pull away from the chasing pack. The keyboard and mouse are truly excellent. Both are wired but very comfortable and responsive. The keyboard is Logitech’s Media Keyboard Elite and the mouse is Logitech’s MX 518 Gaming Grade Optical Mouse, which looks funky and works a treat – even on uniformly-coloured surfaces.

Also of note is the monitor. The Samsung SyncMaster 940B has a very thin bezel (making it good for tiling) and a relatively small round footprint. There’s a good degree of height adjustments and the screen pivot’s too. The 8ms response time is perfectly adequate for gaming and movies and everything looks great thanks to excellent colour reproduction. The BenQs from TI can’t compete. Finally there are the speakers; Logitech’s X530 5.1s - again matching TI’s competitor. These sound great whatever you put through them and get very loud before distorting.

A nice touch is the inclusion of Windows XP Professional – something we’d expect at this price point. Finally there’s the warranty, which doesn’t look much at 1yr RTB. However, for a measly $150 this can be upgraded to 3yrs on-site – money well spent if ever we saw it.

All in, it might cost a little more than TI’s competitor, and not be quite as fast, but it’s a very powerful system with very little in the way of weak points and some great features. If you’re budget runs to $4000, it’s a fantastic buy.