Steam Box Console!

Steam Box is real. Valve is intent on making a series of x86-based living room PCs and prototypes are present at CES 2013. With a PC structure and running the Microsoft competition Linux, this concept of Piston from manufacturer Xi3 is an super small metallic cube that brings to you an impressive design of PC inputs and outputs and is said to draw just 40 watts from the mains, half that of an Xbox 360. It’s believed that Valve itself has invested in Xi3 and that the kit is present, along with other designs, in its CES booth.

The standard Piston Console comes with a 128GB SSD, but you can get a 255GB SSD for $340 more, or a 512GB SSD for another $750. The Piston also includes 8GB of RAM and a 3.2-GHz quad-core processor. Well, what we are looking at here is laptop technology sans screen and keyboard, refactored into an upgradable, modular and very, very small piece of kit. Inside the svelte cube exterior we find a rather innovative approach to PC design in that the motherboard is divided into three distinct sections arranged into a U-shape. At the bottom we find the processor control circuit board which houses the APU and RAM, flanked by two IO boards. The beauty of the design is that all three of these boards can be swapped out for other options, or upgraded. The downside is that three different main-boards are likely to cost significantly more to manufacture than a single product.

Here i will show you a video that explain every detail of the "Steam Box"

Here specific details of the box:

-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 (or shaders)

-4GB-8GB of DDR3 RAM

-64GB-1TB of internal solid-state SSD storage (with up to 12Gbps throughput speeds)

-Three display ports providing maximum resolution of 4096x2160 (including one DisplayPort v1.2 and * 2 Mini-DisplayPorts v1.2)

-Four eSATAp 3.0 ports

-Four USB 3.0 ports

-Four USB 2.0 ports

-1Gb Ethernet port

-Three audio ports (1 input and 2 outputs: 1 copper and 1 optical) 

Xi3 makes sexy cube PCs small enough to grasp easily with one hand. The clever part is that they're modular, the innards separated into three special card components that can be swapped easily. One component handles processor and memory; another display and power; and another I/O or special connectivity options.This nifty design means Xi3 computers can be easily kept up to date, although you'll be restricted to components made for Xi3 machines.

With the power of the Steam brand behind it though, it's safe to say that Valve will have many suitors looking to provide hardware, and the whole point of embracing Linux in the first place is to create the open platform that Gabe Newell and his colleagues believe is in jeopardy with the release of Windows 8. It's going to be very interesting to see how all this develops.

I will say bye until my next post with this video that 

show us this box performing next to an Xbox360