Tranquil PC MMC-12 review

Few people would seriously consider connecting a full-blown desktop PC to their TV. Large, ugly and potentially filled with whirring fans and clunking hard disks, it’s just not an appealing prospect for a living room – unless, that is, the PC in question is the latest silent, super-slim design from the experts at Tranquil PC.

Seemingly crafted from a single chunk of matte black aluminium, the Tranquil MMC-12 is among the most stylish Media Center PCs we’ve seen. It’s a weighty, seriously expensive-feeling bit of kit, and it’s perfectly formed too. Measuring just 40mm high, 225mm deep and an AV rack-friendly 392mm wide, and with an almost featureless front panel, it barely looks like a PC at all – it could be easily mistaken for a high-end Hi-Fi separate.

Silence is golden

That exquisite design is also highly functional. The rows of fins along the MMC-12’s flanks aren’t just for effect, they allow the whole chassis to double as a giant heatsink: the fins provide a larger surface area to dissipate heat, just like a radiator, and make it possible for Tranquil to do away with active cooling entirely. Apart from the subtle blue giveaway glow of the power button on the front, you’d be hard pressed to tell if the MMC-12 is even on.

The processor and chipset are pressed flush against the inside of the chassis, a dab of thermal paste allowing the heat to dissipate directly through the MMC-12’s body, and a miniature Intel SSD plugs into the motherboard’s mSATA slot to provide 80GB of fast, silent storage in a tiny footprint. As the Intel DH61AG Mini-ITX motherboard uses a laptop-style power supply, the only noise comes should you use the optical drive, and even that doesn’t spin up particularly loudly.

It all makes for a power efficient PC too. At idle, the MMC-12 draws just 15W from the mains, rising to 44W running our benchmarks flat out. Playing back a DVD takes the power consumption to a very reasonable 21W. For a PC that’s likely to spend a lot of its time switched on, the MMC-12 shouldn’t result in any unpleasantly high energy bills.

Warming up

There is one noticeable side effect to the MMC-12’s passively cooled design, however: the metal case does get rather hot. With the CPU maxed out for an hour or two, its core temperature crept up to a maximum of 77°C, and the outer casing became uncomfortable to the touch – we measured it at 52°C with our infra-red thermometer.

That’s an extreme scenario, though; under a more realistic load it’s much better. As our review unit came with a DVD writer – a Blu-ray reader is a £132 optional extra – we left a 1080p MKV file looping in the supplied Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre software overnight, and returned to find the CPU at a far healthier 44°C. After more than 14 hours of 1080p playback, the metal casing proved nothing more than warm to the touch. We’d still be cautious of piling other AV equipment on top of it, though, and we wouldn’t keep it in a closed AV rack – as with any passive heatsink it needs reasonable airflow around it.