Following Nvidia’s example, Valve and Xi3 have unveiled Steam Box at this year’s CES. Valve’s Steam Box will be called Piston and can be considered as a mini-PC. In other words, this not a new console from Valve, a rumor that has been circulating on the Internet.
Even though Xi3 did not reveal Piston’s specs, Polygon reported that Piston is modeled after the PC maker’s X7A line of pint-sized computers, priced at $999.
The X7A features a Quad-Core processor with 384-core integrated graphics, 4GB or 8GB of RAM, a nice number of USB ports, and four eSATA ports for extra external storage.
The demo unit of Piston at CES 2013 featured an IO board with one ethernet port, 1/8″ audio in/out, SPDIF optical audio, four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports (with one dedicated to keyboard input), four eSATAp ports, two Mini Display Port ports and one DisplayPort/HDMI port.
Enjoy the following images from Piston (courtesy of Reddit’s user ‘radnerd’) and stay tuned for more!
[UPDATE]
According to Valve, Piston is one of its ‘Steam Box’ solutions and not the only one. The company will reveal more information at a later date, but it targets for the crowd that is interested in low price and high performance designs for the living room that are great candidates for Steam and Big Picture.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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