Valve Distancing Itself From Piston, Xi3 Corp.

[prince_david]

[citation][nom]unksol[/nom]OMG their booths were in the same area? They must be together!Valve has ALWAYS said "steam box" will be a platform. Which basically just means steam. And while they may make an in house machine, it will be open to all manufactures. Anyone who though Xi3 was it would have to be nuts considering their previous unreasonable price and specs. There is no reason to cost so much and be that small except lock in to their upgrade boards. Small form factor PCs can fit normal hardware at much lower prices, and even high end hardware.Valve SHOULD distance themselves because this wanna be console maker hurts their idea for steam box with it's insane price.[/citation]
Well Valve invested money in them

 

[sirencall]

[citation][nom]Fulgurant[/nom]Gotta keep the context in mind. Blaz responded to someone who insisted on much higher specs than the ones you've posted🙁Emphasis mine.)An HD 7850 kicks the living crap out of a Trinity's integrated GPU. It's also a rather large discrete part (as of right now). Then, of course, there's the exhange-rate issue Carol mentioned.[/citation]

Also keep in mind there are low profile 7850's and 7870's already open to the market plus with APU sector, it will only get better with each iteration. Its entirely possibly that there may be an A10 crossfired with another card which would put the performance of the richlands possibly in the 7850 range because if I remember from their website is that there is a gpu added in as a modular component that isnt on the CPU segment of the board. Still overpriced for the performance but if factor in mobility and size of the device it gets the laptop mark-up. Now the par that should make this unique, if true, is that it is supposedly going to be able to run multiple instances of a game on multiple screens but again thats a rumor.

 

[Fulgurant]

[citation][nom]sirencall[/nom]Also keep in mind there are low profile 7850's and 7870's already open to the market plus with APU sector, it will only get better with each iteration. Its entirely possibly that there may be an A10 crossfired with another card which would put the performance of the richlands possibly in the 7850 range because if I remember from their website is that there is a gpu added in as a modular component that isnt on the CPU segment of the board. Still overpriced for the performance but if factor in mobility and size of the device it gets the laptop mark-up. Now the par that should make this unique, if true, is that it is supposedly going to be able to run multiple instances of a game on multiple screens but again thats a rumor.[/citation]

Yes, of course. Things change. If the current rumors about the PS4 are correct, for instance, then Sony will benefit from hardware innovations that simply aren't available on the current consumer market.

But the point blazorthon sought to address is the idea that it's feasible, right now, for a DIY PC builder to shoehorn a 7850 and a decent CPU into a mITX form factor for about $450 -- and the answer is, "No; you can barely hit that budget with a much larger form factor."

What we (consumers) can do right now might not be relevant in the future, but what we can do right now certainly helps to inform our evaluation of value propositions going forward.

 

[blazorthon]

Also keep in mind there are low profile 7850's and 7870's already open to the market plus with APU sector, it will only get better with each iteration. Its entirely possibly that there may be an A10 crossfired with another card which would put the performance of the richlands possibly in the 7850 range because if I remember from their website is that there is a gpu added in as a modular component that isnt on the CPU segment of the board. Still overpriced for the performance but if factor in mobility and size of the device it gets the laptop mark-up. Now the par that should make this unique, if true, is that it is supposedly going to be able to run multiple instances of a game on multiple screens but again thats a rumor.

A Richland APU even in Crossfire with a similar discrete card will not be anywhere near a Radeon 7850, just saying. Richland is just an improved version of Trinity according to AMD and chances are that it'll only support Crossfire with the same graphics cards as Trinity, aka up to the Radeon 6670. Beating even a Radeon 7770 is unlikely and going on to be anywhere near the Radeon 7850 is pretty much impossible with that hardware. Perhaps some extreme memory and overclocking could do the job, but that wouldn't be done in any pre-built system.

Even if these Xi3 systems have a GPU option that goes for say $100 and it could bring up the performance to say a Radeon 7770, which is still kinda a stretch, it'd be not just a little expensive for say a laptop-mark up, it'd be about double the price of many similarly performing laptops that come with many more features such as built-in display, speakers, web cams (sometimes), keyboard/touchpad, and more. The value would be horrendous.

Being low profile isn't going to stop the fact that those cards are still using around 100W to around 130W of power. That's a lot of heat to dissipate for a very small form factor, especially one that is built to not be loud with fans.

I think that Fulgurant addressed the other details better than I would have, so I'll leave it be

Being able to run multiple instances of games on multiple screens seems interesting, but I don't think that it has the performance to do that very well.

 

[tim tellschaft]

Have a look at the German Copmuter Magazine c't, they building a SteamBox for ~475€

http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Dampfmaschine-1816396.html
http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/c-t-Steam-Box-Aufbauanleitung-und-Steam-Oberflaeche-1819208.html
http://www.heise.de/ct/projekte/c-t-Steam-Box-Spielkonsole-selbst-gebaut-1812446.html
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/c-t-Steam-Box-Spielkonsole-im-Eigenbau-1819942.html


Run it through google Translator.

http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fct%2Fartikel%2FDampfmaschine-1816396.html&act=url&authuser=0

 

[tim tellschaft]

Copmuter -> computer

 

[g00fysmiley]

just buy a small form factor pc with a microatx or itx board that uses standard graphics cards, they exist and the build will cost you much less than $1k