Tranquil PC

PCs may be getting more powerful by the month, but having faster chips also means an overload of concentrated heat. You need at least four fans in an average modern PC, sometimes more, and more fans means more noise. Believe me, working on Armari's Magnetar X64DP Opteron workstation was like to trying to sleep in a low-flying aircraft zone. But a new British company thinks it might have the answer with the Tranquil PC.

Like the Hush Mini-ITX, the Tranquil PC is based on an EPIA-M mini-ITX motherboard and uses the outer casing as a heatsink extension. There are no fans in the entire system and, with the exception of the odd hard-disk click, it's absolutely silent. However, instead of using a heatpipe like the Hush, the Tranquil PC just has a metal heatsink on the CPU that touches the side of the case. This is enough to stop the system crashing, but it's not enough to stop it heating up. After running our benchmarks for a while, the top and right-hand side of this machine were really hot to touch.

It's also slow compared to modern PCs. The integrated 1GHz C3 Nehemiah processor is enough to power Windows XP and general office apps, but it struggles with anything complex like MP3- or MPEG-encoding. In fact, it took over 27 minutes to complete our MP3-encoding test, compared with around two-and-a-half minutes on an Athlon XP 3200+ system.

The problem for the C3 is that it still has a limited floating- point unit, which is precisely what it needs for this kind of work. It's also the floating-point unit that's going to be needed by software synthesizers and music apps - exactly the sort of things that are crying out for a silent PC. The version tested here only comes with a basic 40GB 5,400rpm hard disk and 256MB of RAM, so it isn't ideal for music and video apps anyway.

What it is ideal for is a quiet set-top box in the lounge, especially as it has both S-Video and composite video outs. The AGP UniChrome video adaptor even has an integrated MPEG-2 decoder, which handles DVD movie playback admirably, with smooth performance and no dropped frames. It does, however, struggle with anything moving fast like rolling credits, which stuttered across the screen instead of flowing.

You could also roll out the Tranquil PC across an office. The benchmark score of 0.40 in our Word and Excel test shows it has enough power for general office work, and the difference in noise between ten Tranquil PCs and ten standard PCs will be unbelievable, making everything from communication to concentration a lot easier. It could even reduce your electricity bill: the external power supply only consumes 55W, compared with the average 350W on a standard desktop.

But for anyone who's serious about PCs, this isn't the machine to go for. It's not only disappointingly slow, but also lacks expandability. There's only one PCI slot and one DIMM socket on the EPIA-M board and you can forget high-speed graphics too. The integrated S3G CLE266 could only manage a sluggish score of 725 in 3DMark2001 SE, and with no AGP slot you can't make this better.

The only way you can expand the Tranquil PC is with external peripherals, and with four USB 2 ports, two six-pin FireWire ports and a parallel and serial port you've got plenty of room for just about any device on the market.

There's no doubt that the Tranquil PC will adequately do the job for many people. Its complete silence also represents a successful piece of design. The problem is that we've already seen PCs like the Signum DataFuture Client (see issue 94, p119), which are similarly silent and also offer a Pentium 4 micro-ATX motherboard with an AGP slot. If all you're looking for is a basic PC that makes no noise, the Tranquil is a good deal for just £595, but it isn't for the serious PC user and the Hush Mini-ITX keeps cooler.

Author: Ben Hardwidge