Xi3 is taking pre-orders for its Piston Console, which has been dubbed the first unofficial Steam Box.

The Piston Console won’t come cheap, however. It will set you back(Opens in a new window) $999.99, though Xi3 is offering a $100 discount to anyone who orders before 11:59 p.m. CST on Sunday, March 17, 2013. Xi3 expects the devices to ship in time for the 2013 holiday season.

The standard Piston Console comes with a 128GB SSD, but buyers can get a 255GB SSD for $340 more, or a 512GB SSD for another $750. The Piston also includes 8GB of RAM and a 3.2-GHz quad-core processor.

Xi3 first unveiled its “grapefruit-sized” Piston Console at CES, at which time the company said(Opens in a new window) it was designed specifically to support Valve’s Steam and its Big Picture mode “for residential and LAN party computer gaming on larger high-def screens.”

Also at CES, Xi3 said it received an investment from Valve, though no other details were released. But it got tongues wagging at the thought of the Steam Box finally coming to market.

Reports of a Steam Box from Valve first appeared a year ago. The idea is that the device would be a customizable console, allowing you to modify the software and run whatever games you want, something that’s not possible with top consoles like the Xbox or PlayStation.

In an interview with Geek Wire(Opens in a new window), Xi3’s chief marketing officer, David Politis, said the company had “re-imagined the whole PC.” Xi3 took the standard motherboard, shrunk it down, and broke it into three component pieces, he said. That means users can easily upgrade or modify their computers without having to be an engineer.

The Piston Console will ship standard with Windows, but Politis said “pretty much any x86-based application or operating system can run on it,” from Linux to Android.

“That’s part of this whole concept of being open, not setting barriers to say, as the user, you own content, or license content, or create content. You should decide how you use that content and how do you access that content,” he said. “It should not be the manufacturer who directs how you do that.”