YouTuber boots Windows on forgotten Valve Steam Box gaming console prototype, runs multiple games on it

At CES 2013, Valve showed off a prototype for its very first gaming console called Steam Box. Codenamed Piston, it was made by a hardware company called Xi3. The machine was ahead of its time, featuring modular aspects that promised easy upgradability.

However, Valve eventually pulled out of this partnership with Xi3, presumably due to Xi3 wanting to keep it a Windows-based system instead of running SteamOS. Now, a little over 10 years later, the same Steam Box prototype landed in the hands of a YouTuber called Bringus Studios.

At first, the YouTuber didn't realize that it was the same gaming console prototype Xi3 and Valve showcased at CES 2013. But after struggling to get the system ready for gaming, Bringus did some further investigation and figured out that it was supposed to be a Steam Box game machine.

While Bringus didn't mention it in the video, Xi3 did start selling the gaming console exclusively under its own name after Valve ended the partnership. That means there could possibly be quite a number of these out there.

Nonetheless, Bringus initially struggled to get an OS running on the gaming console. With some effort, the YouTuber could get Windows 11 to boot on the gaming mini PC. However, as the hardware is quite dated, getting drivers installed on it became a challenge. For better compatibility, Bringus downgraded to Windows 10.

After that came the interesting part, which was gaming on the mini PC that would've been the Steam Box gaming console. Well, it turns out that the system can smoothly handle quite a number of games of its time. This is mostly due to the PC packing the AMD Trinity R-464L APU with Radeon HD 7660G iGPU, a top-end mobile processor from 2013.

However, dated hardware has its limits, and that became apparent when Bringus tried to run something modern on it, such as Counter-strike 2. Still, it's quite an interesting mini computer that could've been Valve's first Steam gaming console (Steam Deck available on Amazon). To learn more about the modular features and how the hardware of the Xi3 gaming mini PC performs, check the video that's attached below.