Tranquil PC serves up a pair of high-end but laid-back HTPCs

We haven't heard from the folks at Tranquil in some time, the UK-based firm's employees surely too busy watching all the As Time Goes By episodes they stuffed onto their last five-bay media server, but they've sent Gene and Lionel on their way and are back to announce two new HTPCs. First is the T7-MP2, a tiny, fanless Ion- and Atom-powered machine that offers HDMI output for direct connectivity to your HDTV and up to 1TB of storage, starting at a rather pricey £479 (about $700). The other is a more powerful beast, the ixVL, coming sometime next month with either an Intel Core i3 or i5 CPU inside and an optical drive (DVD or Blu-ray), but still no fans for quiet operation. No price on this one yet, but expect it to cost, you know, more than the other one.