The Steam Box is Now Available on Pre Order, if You Don't Mind Spending $1.000

It’s no secret that Valve, the creator of hit games like Half-Life and the Steam PC download service, is planning a push into the living room with its own line of Steam Box consoles, gaming PCs with the footprints of an Xbox or PlayStation that sit quietly under your telly. Now, the very first Steam Box is up for pre-order – but it’ll cost you a cool $999.99 (£670).

The Piston gaming PC turned heads at the CES expo back in January: not just because it was a tiny, customisable gaming rig, but because Valve had invested in the company behind it, Xi3, as part of its plans. You can nowpre-order the Xi3 Piston, which will ship in time for Christmas, from the company’s website.

For that four digit pricetag, you get a machine powered by a 3.2GHz processor and 8GB of memory, and packing a speedy 128GB of solid state storage that can play all of your games on a TV using Steam’s Big Picture mode.

That’s an eye watering amount for gaming console alternative (it’s unlikely Sony would try and charge that much for the PS4, for instance), but it is also a full PC that can jump online and play whatever video you like – no need to wait around for apps. You can also bet that this is only the start: expect many more Steam Box designs to come, with much lower pricetags.

Would you pay that much for a tiny gaming rig? Sound off with your thoughts in the comments below! [GadgetShow]

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New Steam Box is Even Smaller: Tiny PC Hooked to The TV

At CES in Las Vegas last week, we were treated to Xi3’s tasty take on the Steam Box, Valve’s game console-like PC. But now the company is back for more, outing a tiny little PC, the Z3RO Pro, which can be used as a mini home theatre PC with a small footprint to serve up video to your TV.

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Measuring around the same size as a small paperback book, the tiny PC will hide away behind all your television equipment and has all sorts of hardware crammed into its shell, including a dual core processor running at 1.65GHz, as well as 4GB of RAM, from 16GB to 1TB of solid state storage, and a wide range of ports that will let you hook up plenty more hard drives and gadgets.

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The system should be able to handle Windows, but the box itself will ship with a version of Linux to keep costs down. Look forward to putting on your own media software onto the tiny box from March for $399 (£248) and up. [GadgetShow]

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