Xi3's Piston Steam Box Pre-Orders Available For $1,000

Earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show Valve's Gabe Newell let the gaming universe know that their living room home entertainment solution would be known as a Steam Box. The really good news was that there wouldn't be just one box, but a number of different boxes mostly dedicated to Steam and having various price points. Well, Xi3 was the first to announce the pricing for their version and isn't cheap.

Joystiq managed to get some pricing information on Xi3's Piston, a small PC designed to make it easy for gamers to plug-and-play on TV and access your games on Steam just like a console with the Big Picture Mode.

MSI and Killer Technology shared some positive thoughts on the upcoming Steam Box solutions, but I doubt anyone thought Xi3 would be throwing out a price for their Piston so soon. So how much does it cost? $1,000.

The Xi3 Piston and the upcoming X7A Modular Computer sport 2.8 through 3.2ghz quad-core processors, 128GB SSD, 8GB DDR3 RAM and an option to upgrade to a 512GB SSD for only $750.

I guess we already have an idea of how Xi3 is planning to approach the Steam Box solution. Take note that this is just one of many third-party, living-room solutions for PC gaming. Valve has yet to showcase their own first-party prototypes, which will be publicly tested in the next couple of months. Valve has also yet to put any pricing ranges on their own prototypes but I imagine that's coming soon.

Xi3's Piston will be available this holiday season. If you're really keen on pre-ordering the grapefruit-sized PC, feel free to visit the Official Xi3 Website.