Tranquil ships T7 and T2e Atom media PCs

Ignoring all those silly Atom shortages, Tranquil PC has their T7 and T2e Atom media PCs ready for delivery. As expected, the T7 is based on a fanless design for your uber-quiet home theater and measures only 8.8 x 9.1 x 2.2-inches with space for a 2.5-inch SATA drive. Meanwhile, the T2e can be fitted with a slot-loading DVD drive and comes in a more media rack-friendly form factor. They both pack the Intel Atom 230 at 1.6GHz and will set you Brits back starting around £189 and £284 (or $371 and $554 US), for the T7 and T2e, respectively.

[Photo by PC Pro]

Read - T7 Atom at Tranquil PC
Read - T2e Atom at Tranquil PC

[schmitty338 @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:06PM]

Sweeeeet....

Q: Can the 1.6Ghz Atom playback 1080p video? I wonder what kind of ports this thing will offer as that can make or break a device like this.

[schmitty338 @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:07PM]

Well...i guess it doesn't really matter since they are both pretty ugly IMHO...in the picture above it looks pretty good, but the more realistic shots are pretty bland.

[Shogmaster @ Jun 3rd 2008 3:10PM]

No it can't. It's slow as a 900MHz Dothan Celeron for decoding work. It can't do smooth playback of 720p videos either with any of the more aggressive codecs. I'm not even sure how decent of a 480p media player this thing will be.

This is one of the most ridiculous product ideas I have seen in a long time. Whoever thought up this POS needs to go market pet foods or something.

[0megapart!cle @ Jun 3rd 2008 3:26PM]

Wrong.
The Atom 1.6 Ghz's performance is between Dothan Pentium M 800 Mhz and 1.2 Ghz. It can play almost all 720p video (at very high CPU utilization), and can play even the most aggressive 1080p Bluray video if equipped with a chipset that can handle some of the decoding itself.

[Phil Perman @ Jun 3rd 2008 3:34PM]

Had the Atom been paired with a Poulsbo chipset (eg 945GSE) it would have hardware h.264/VC1/mpeg2 720p/1080i acceleration and would make a pretty good HD box, but Tranquil put a 945GC in there (Lakeport G based, which from what I can tell dates back to the P4 era) so thats kinda killed any HD capabilities

[fischju @ Jun 3rd 2008 3:43PM]

The Hantro 8190 can decode 1080p, and only tuns at 165mhz

[Jim @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:07PM]

Does it come with the option for a DUAL tuner TV card?

[Will @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:13PM]

Which idiot who wrote this article forgot to look for the little thing that says exc. VAT. Add on another 17.5% if you want it in the EU

[JJV @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:21PM]

depends on where you are in the EU, tax differs and its usually 21%, 20% or 19%
but it varies as in Lux its 15%

[aaron @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:34PM]

1.6 ghz and intel graphics...not sure it will handle 1080p or even 720p x.264

[revs @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:44PM]

hmmm so close to being a pretty good HTPC

[Simon Dick @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:51PM]

I have my Atom motherboard, just got to wait for parts to build the system properly :)

[ilh @ Jun 3rd 2008 2:52PM]

Might as well get an eeebox over the T7. Same as the base T7 model but with twice the HDD space, 4 times the RAM and uses the more expensive less power consuming N270 but still costs less (even taking into account the increase in price everything gets when coming to the UK, I still think the eeebox will be less than the £222 inc VAT of the T7).

[jakep_82 @ Jun 3rd 2008 4:01PM]

You can upgrade the video card to an HD2400 with DVI out which is more than capable of 1080p if you offload everything to the GPU. What I don't see is any way to get digital sound out of it. It's not much of a media PC if it only has stereo sound.

[b @ Jun 3rd 2008 4:35PM]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829270004

[jakep_82 @ Jun 3rd 2008 5:20PM]

That would work, but it adds another $40 to the cost and wouldn't look very nice. The Mac Mini is a much better deal all things considered.

[b @ Jun 3rd 2008 4:35PM]

test http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829270004

[Kai @ Jun 4th 2008 12:04PM]

This would be better off as a home server - to share files across the network, share iTunes libraries, printers, etc. and then have another more powerful device to act as a HTPC. Maybe we can have a HTPC that is switched off (to save energy) and then sent a Wake-on-LAN packet to get the HTPC to start recording and encoding TV shows at a certain time.

By the way both devices only come with a VGA out (no DVI or HDMI or Svideo), though there are upgrade options for the T2e (including a HD2400 which is listed as an option)...

[SamC @ Jun 4th 2008 5:33PM]

As far as I can see these are being marketed by Tranquil as WHS systems, not HTPC's. So there.

[GQ @ Jun 4th 2008 7:30PM]

I wonder if it would make a good, low power, home web server appliance to replace an aging tower that is taking up valuable space, heating up the room and humming louder than my refrigerator. A simple, small, low power black box with no peripherals and a LAN port is all I need. It just needs to serve up web pages and photos.