Xi3 Piston: An intresting gaming system

[mandru]

But to call it just a gaming system is an understatement.  For many people it would be a full blown desktop alternative that anyone with a wide streak of neat freakishness would admire.  ;)

I've seen the Xⁱ³ at a local mall and was pretty impressed with it.  It comes loaded with a SUSE Linux OS or can be upgraded to Win7 Pro or Win 8 Pro at price gradients when ordered.  The CPU is a fairly nimble AMD Trinity (@ 3.2 GHz I believe) keeping power consumption low.  It runs on a stingy 40 to 50 watts of power and has a remarkably small footprint for all the guts it's got.  One of the units on display at the mall kiosk was being used to run a small touch screen monitor for their invoicing system and at the same time feed a video promo loop to a nearby 40 inch Hi-Def flat screen.  The Piston was hidden from view leaving completely uncluttered counter space by its being mounted on the back of the monitor using the monitor's wall mount hardware.

On the opposite side of the kiosk another rig was loaded with the latest iteration of COD and sending the video to a 45 inch flat screen for the kids passing by to try out.  From what I could tell it was doing a fine job running the game and posting to that large of a scale screen with no noticeable flaws in the imaging that I could see even from closer than comfortable viewing distance.  Apparently the Piston will drive three screens in a horizontal array for an extra wide view format.

Games purchased on Steam can be downloaded, stored on the Piston's 126GB HD for quick play or swapped back and forth with your other purchased games stored on Steam.  There's even an expansion module that adds up to a standard 2TB HD or up to 512GB SSD storage also using minimal space (think comparably smaller than a 300 page paperback book) with the Piston nesting atop it.

Time mark 1:05 of this video shows the Piston in the best scale.

Xi3 Piston Console Trailer

If Youtube is blocking the vid above over international music issues it can also be found in the image gallery at the bottom of the page on this link:

http://www.xi3.com/piston


In conclusion I'm not interested in giving up my i7 monster rig but thought it might interest some of you guys if only from a design point of view.  :)

[Art Blade]

not blocked, and looks good indeed :-X

[PZ]

Impressive, mandru - if I didn't know better, I'd think you were an IT guy

[Art Blade]

haha, yes indeed, I was under the same impression while reading that post  ^-^

[mandru]

Impressive, mandru - if I didn't know better, I'd think you were an IT guy

Heh. 

Only if IT stands for irascibly truculent or irritating troll.  :-D

In my own defense I'll just say that I've always been interested in cool innovations for case modding and if you add that to my tendency to be easily distracted by sparkly things I wanted to provide enough peripheral details about the Piston system to hopefully make it at least passingly interesting to someone besides myself.  I also wanted to informationally qualify my presentation as having been worth the start of a new thread.

In the four and a half feet I have I'll sadly admit that my desktop space is a sadly cluttered mess.  It's a visceral hodgepodge of things I've planned on reading and other things I just haven't gotten around to yet.  ::)

There's something very Zen about the picture I have in my mind's eye of a gaming system completely hidden from view behind a large screen TV that's fully accessed by a wireless gaming controller.

It might be easy to see why this simple gaming concept would appeal to me considering that (as a pure concept) it's a lot less cluttered than my normal speech patterns.  ;)

[Art Blade]

nice one, mandru  :-D

The longer you're with us, the more elaborate (and weirder) your posts, the more I'm glad we talked you into staying with us and encouraged you to keep posting the way you always wanted to.  :) Actually, let me slap you on the back for being such a great guy and friend. +1 :-X

[mandru]

 :-D

[PZ]

nice one, mandru  :-D

The longer you're with us, the more elaborate (and weirder) your posts, the more I'm glad we talked you into staying with us and encouraged you to keep posting the way you always wanted to.  :) Actually, let me slap you on the back for being such a great guy and friend. +1 :-X

Couldn't agree more - +1  :-X

You post anything and any way you want, mandru