Being produced by hardware manufacturer Xi3, with help and funding from Valve.
The much talked about living-room PC from Valve, ‘The Steam Box’, has been unveiled at Consumer Electronic Shows along with system features and a rough price point.
Meet the modular PC which can fit in the palm of your hand.
According to VG247, the hardware codenamed ‘Piston’ has been officially developed by Xi3 but is being bankrolled by Valve, with the Seattle developer investing substantially in the hardware company behind it. The Piston platform is still being developed by Xi3 and has been designed from the ground-up for use with Steam and the digital service’s Big Picture Mode. The demo unit currently on the CES show-floor included the following features:
- Ethernet port
- 1/8” audio in/out port
- Four USB 3.0 ports
- Four USB 2.0 ports
- Four eSATAp ports,
- Two Mini Display ports,
- One HDMI port
- 1TB of Internal storage
Polygon also has word from that the unit would be priced at around $1000 with a similar CPU and RAM spec to Xi3′s recently announced X7A Kickstarter initiative, which boasted a quad-core 64-bit, x86-based 32nm processor running at up to 3.2GHz (with 4MB of Level2 Cache), an integrated graphics processor (GPU) containing up to 384 programmable graphics cores and 8GB of DDR3 RAM. Core components will also be upgradable.
Purpose-built PC solutions tend to cost more than those which are individually sourced on a component by component basis. That said the tiny size of the Piston platform should make that initial $1000 investment seem a bit more welcoming, and much harder for users to put together themselves.
Would you be willing to part serious money to snap up a Piston console for living room convenience, or are you happy with your regular ol’ desktop PC? Let us know in the comments.
Tags: Piston, The Steam Box, Valve, Xi3
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