Xi3 Piston goes on pre-sale, NOT Steam box
posted:
3/12/2013 5:25:00 AM
More On:
xi3
The Xi3 has been trying to get off the ground for a while as I've seen the product at a few past CES shows. They didn't get a successful Kickstarter, but it looks like they are on track to finally ship the product as you can pre-order one starting at $999 with a discount of $100 that brings it down to $899 for a limited time.
The Xi3 Piston uses an AMD R464 APU clocked at 2.3GHz with a burst mode of 3,2GHz and contains four cores. AMD's APU has both the CPU and GPU on the same chip to save space. AMD classifies the GPU in the 7660G series. You'll be able to pick various SSD sizes if you should pre-order.
Now, some folks might have this confused with the Steam box that Valve's working on. Yes, Valve did back Xi3 as announced at CES, but this isn't an official Steam box that people might be thinking of. In fact, Valve isn't even associated with the Xi3 folks anymore.
It does seem capable of playing a lot of Steam games and comes in at a very small footprint though. At $999, it's pretty expensive but you are paying for size in this case. You can definitely build one with better components but at a small HTPC size for probably half to 3/4 the price.
The Xi3 Piston uses an AMD R464 APU clocked at 2.3GHz with a burst mode of 3,2GHz and contains four cores. AMD's APU has both the CPU and GPU on the same chip to save space. AMD classifies the GPU in the 7660G series. You'll be able to pick various SSD sizes if you should pre-order.
Now, some folks might have this confused with the Steam box that Valve's working on. Yes, Valve did back Xi3 as announced at CES, but this isn't an official Steam box that people might be thinking of. In fact, Valve isn't even associated with the Xi3 folks anymore.
It does seem capable of playing a lot of Steam games and comes in at a very small footprint though. At $999, it's pretty expensive but you are paying for size in this case. You can definitely build one with better components but at a small HTPC size for probably half to 3/4 the price.
