In early August, the Piston V appeared online, shrouded in mystery, but ran the gauntlet in a video by ETA Prime. Now, the Piston V has officially launched on Kickstarter at a surprisingly early bird price. The Kickstarter campaign also fully reveals the mini PC's specs and bundled accessories. The Piston V launched on Kickstarter with a super early bird price of $559, and, at the time of writing, is available starting at $590. However, the post-Kickstarter MSRP is expected to be around $799.

The creators of the mini PC and its crowdfunding campaign tout the device as a hybrid mini PC and game console "in a gadget form factor," with the Bazzite/Windows dual-boot and a 4-inch touchscreen on the front adding to the HTPC experience. As was shown in the pre-launch hands-video, the mini PC will feature the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 APU with its built-in AMD Radeon 880M iGPU, which should deliver reasonable performance for most non-AAA games.

All models available in the Kickstarter come with 16 GB of DDR5-5600 memory and a 500 GB PCIe Gen 4x4 M.2 SSD, but the specs are upgradeable to 24, 32, 48, or 64 GB of memory and up to 4 TB of SSD storage. One thing that wasn't mentioned in the original hands-on was the presence of an OCuLink port for eGPU support. The Kickstarter also gives us a proper list of available ports and connectivity options, which include dual 2.5 G LAN ports, Bluetooth 5.3, Wi-Fi 7, two USB Type-A ports of unspecified speed, USB4, HDMI 2.1, a 3.5 mm audio combo jack, and a dedicated 19 V DC-in jack.

Comically, the mini PC's alarm clock form factor is really driven home by a built-in speaker on the top and a comically large orange sleep button where the alarm's snooze button would usually be. Fortunately, the mini PC seems to still have the easy-access slots on the back for SODIMM and SSD upgrades, as shown in the prototype sent to ETA Prime.