Xi3 Modular cube: tiny power-packed PC

Thursday 11 November

Four inches of pure computing power

The desktop is dead, right? After all, what with those glossy tablets, paper-thin sub-notebooks, clever smartphones and convenient netbooks, the clunky old desk-bound box doesn’t stand a chance, right?

Except this clever little fellow from Xi3 Corporation is no mere box – it’s a cube, and one measuring just 4in to a side. To put it in perspective, some smartphones are taller than that.

Yet Xi3’s compact computing cube is plenty smart enough in its own right – so much so that it’s just picked up the CES 2011 Innovations Award in the Computer Hardware category. It comes with a choice of three AMD 64-bit dual-core processors, with up to 4GB of memory and, most impressively of all, power requirements of just 20W.

And rest assured, you get plenty of ports and connections for adding all those vital extras that turn a box into a working PC you can use. A pair of eSATA ports for hard drives sit beside a whopping six USB connections, plus network, DVI, DisplayPort, audio in and out and a mysterious “Xm3dia” connection all crammed in too.

The cut-size credentials are achieved by dividing the classic motherboard structure into three, with the cube’s aluminium casing itself serving as a giant heatsink.

It’s all very clever, and with prices starting at $849 (yes, it’s US-only for now) perhaps not as pricey as you might think – especially considering you’re supporting what seems more and more like an endangered species.