When Valve announced the Steam Machines earlier this year, I think a lot of people were expecting console sized PC boxes similar to Valve's prototype. While this was true for the first Steam Machine to be revealed, the London based company Piixl has come up with something quite different.
You may not have heard of Piixl before but its Steam Machine design is pretty cool: it's called the Jetpack and it's designed to be completely hidden in your living room setup by sliding on to the back of your HDTV. While details are few and far between on the company's website at the moment, the company’s managing director told Pocket-Lint that “Jetpack is an open and fully customizable hardware platform”. Piixl has released a similar looking product before, it was called the EdgeCenter PC and its top configuration consisted of: An Intel Core i7 3770 CPU, a GTX 680 graphics card, and 16GB of RAM.
The Jetpack will be just as capable and feature specs up to overclocked Core I7 CPU's and GPU's as high up the chain as the Titan.
Valve will be releasing more details about Steam OS and its Steam Machine partners at CES next year, Piixl's relationship with Valve isn't certain yet so while this could be a Steam Machine, it's only listed as a Steam OS compatible PC on the main website. If they are planning on shipping these out with Steam OS pre-installed then it should be considered a Steam Machine anyway.
The Jetpack will start at $1000 USD which converts to £610 in the UK, but will no doubt be more once you factor in VAT and import tax.
KitGuru Says: We haven't seen many Steam Machines yet but this one is my favorite so far- even if it's not been officially named as such by Valve. What do you guys think of this one? Are there any designs you'd like to see for Valve's branded living room PC's?