Xi3 Piston Has Matured Since Last Year

Go back to January 2013, and everyone thought Xi3’s Piston was going to be the one and only Steam Box. Fast forward to January 2014, and we now know that Steam Boxes are completely different than everyone’s first notion, but that doesn’t discredit Xi3’s Piston in any way. Xi3 has been hard at work for the last year, so let’s see what they’ve done with the Piston.

Xi3 Piston Back Ports

November 2013 was a busy month, both PlayStation 4 (PS4) and Xbox One (X1) launched, but so did Xi3’s Piston. Like the X1 and PS4, Piston is x86 based, it can run the latest games like Crysis 3 and Battlefield 4, supports up to 3 monitors, 1Gbps Ethernet, along with USB 2.0, 3.0, and eSATA ports. Xi3 packed all of these features into possibly the smallest form factor ever.

Xi3 Breakdown PCB

Not only has Xi3 created one of the smallest form factors ever, it is also the easiest upgradeable PC on the market. Need a new processor? No problem, just buy another card, remove the current one and insert the new one. No need to worry about thermal paste, heatsinks, or matching sockets. Want more storage? Once again, no problem. The side of Xi3’s Piston can be removed and you can attach up to a 1TB SSD.

Xi3 Piston Custom Interface

Xi3 has also created a custom interface. The interface can be changed by the user to display items they most commonly used. In the screenshot above, we see Steam, Movies, TV, Hulu, etc. But any of those items can be replaced with something you would prefer like Netflix or Music.

Xi3’s Piston is available now with a 3.2GHz AMD APU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, and 128GB SSD for $999.

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