Xi3 Piston Not the Steam Box – but a nice piece of kit!
The Xi3 Piston console is being backed by Valved, and is being considered a third-party Steam Box will set you back a rather cool $1000 and should be hitting the stores in time for Christmas (this year). If you are one to pre-order, you will get a rather nice $100 off the price and the certainty of having the system during the 2013 holiday season.
We know that the Xi3 Piston is going to be using Linux as an OS, and will be for PC like in architecture. It’ll feature a Radeon 7000 series graphics card, along with 8GB of DDR3 RAM and an AMD Trinity Quad Core 3.2ghz CPU (the R464). There’ll also be three different SSD available, ranging from the more modest 128GB all the way up to 512GB.
The system is not alone in being an unofficial Steam Box – but it seems to have captured the most media attention. It will be using the Steam software in “big picture mode” and will of course be ideally suited to hooking up to the large TV in your house. The system will only be using 40 Watts of power from the mains, that’s a 50 percent reduction on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 (the latest models of course) and so will be impressively cool and powerful.
“Clearly, the computer/video gaming market is huge, both in the personal computer and traditional console markets,” Xi3 Corporation Jason A. Sullivan said.
“That being said, we believe there is a crying need for a machine that captures the best of both worlds, with the upgradeability of computer gaming rigs and the design and form factor of consoles. We believe our Piston Consoles do exactly that – deliver the beauty and small size of consoles with the upgradeability of computers.”
He isn’t wrong on the market being huge – and as I’ve said a dozen times over now in my videos, 2013 will be one of the most interesting years in gaming for a long time with not only big pieces of hardware from Microsoft and Sony (the XBox 720 and Playstation 4) but Nintendo will be turning up the pressure with the Wii U, and of course now Valve are gearing up to launch their own official (and unofficial) Steam Box systems. If Apple really do decide to jump into the fray, who knows what will happen!