Piixl jumps into the Steam Machine ring.

Not to long ago IBuyPower, a well-known American gaming PC vendor showed off their own Steam Machine to the world. Sporting a lot of AMD hardware inside. Well now a company called Piixl has now decided to jump in the ring and show off their own Steam Machine. This contenders name is Piixl “Jetpack”.

About Piixl

For those unfamiliar with Piixl’s work they are known for the Edgecenter computers. PiixL Technologies Ltd is a London-based company that designs and integrates convergent hardware solutions for the discerning gamer. Our products are at the leading-edge and follow Don Norman’s concept of “invisible computer”, literally by hiding behind displays, and because they integrate the latest technology packages and aim to be always more intuitive and user-friendly. – See more at: http://piixl.com/

The JetPack

The Jetpack is the successor to the Edgecenter computer but Francois-Xavier Gardes Managing Director from at Piixl had a few words to share to The Inquirer.net about their intent for the Jetpack.

The machine is designed to be unobtrusive, quiet, virtually invisible and yet blends in the fastest components available and and perfect compatibility with any components rom the general PC hardware ecosystem. So we’re somewhere between geek-chic and hardcore-geek.

In the presskit they stated that the Jetpack will be able to run windows but they want it optimized for SteamOS. That is not all, Gardes also added about the fans,

We rely on an exclusive variant of high tech centrifugal fans that were recently developed in Japan. We developed the machine in Taipei with some very savvy high-density-computing experts. We run quiet, cool, without warming up the TV to which we’re attached, and actually without even disrupting the eventual natural air convection that might be occurring inside the TV!

But the Jetpack is also boasting a new generation of centrifugal fans to stay ultra-quiet at all times (which Grandes mentioned above) while being able to host factory overclocked Core i7 processors, up to one Terabyte of SSD storage, and the latest graphics cards from nVidia, including Titan and GTX780s. I found this very interesting because they stated that the starting price would be 1000$. The Titan alone is 1000$ Piixl has yet to release the rest of the specs and prices but we are should hear about it before the end of 2013.

Grandes also showed interest about the Steam Controller, he added.

I think the Valve controller will be an awesome product and we’ll definitely aim to include it, along with a very smart lap keyboard / mouse for Windows gamers that might not want to give up their current controllers.
We’re also really active on the field on natural interfaces for the 10-feet-experience, and how to best use motion-sensing and voice recognition technologies in that framework

This is very interesting, A TV or wall mounted Steam Machine is coming. The floodgates have opened and this is only the beginning. The Jetpack is set to release on January 1st 2014 (SHUT THE FRONT DOOR, that is very soon). What are your thoughts on this new contender? Would you want a wall or tv mounted steam machine? What do you think the price will be? No SteamOS info has been released, is SteamOS going to be ready for January 1st? Let us know in the comments below.