When the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive first came out, that meant starting with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290, each of which cost around $320 back then, and the best you could get was a $700 GeForce GTX 980 Ti. As of June 2016 there's a new sheriff in town: the $200 AMD Radeon RX 480. We put it through a battery of VR tests, and it seems just as capable as the GTX 970 for a good bit less money. (In fact, it's a bit smoother in some games.). Yes, that's a $200 graphics card. But Nvidia hasn't stood still. The GTX 970 can now be found for as low as $270 -- and more importantly, the new (but hard to find) $380 GTX 1070 and $600 GTX 1080 are mopping the floor with every other graphics card. If you're going to pay more than the bare minimum to get a futureproof VR system, you'll want one of those two new Nvidia cards -- though you may want to wait until they come down in price before you buy one.
It's worth noting that current VR titles don't support more than one GPU at a time, although a dual-GPU system will still work fine with VR, and even a single high-end GPU like a GTX 980 can be overkill for the initial crop of VR games, That said, popular development platforms such as Unreal Engine 4 will incorporate Nvidia's tech to link two graphics cards together, and there's also no guarantee that game developers iphone 8 plus champagne sheer glam case will stick to the system specs that Oculus and Valve recommend, We found we could already turn up the graphical settings in a few games (Eve: Valkyrie, Project Cars and The Gallery) to higher levels than a $200 AMD Radeon RX 480 can handle..
Intel's high-end Core i7 Skylake processor requires newer motherboards and memory. The bare minimum. For a mini PC. What we used. The CPU or central processing unit is your gaming rig's brain, and while the graphics card will be doing most of the heavy lifting in virtual reality, you'll still need a CPU that's up to the task. Recommendations for both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive start at Intel's Core i5-4590, a solid mid-range part that's a little long in the tooth, but still plenty capable. But capable isn't good enough for our future-proofed rig, so we're heading right to the top of Intel's stack with the Core i7-6700K. This processor throws a few wrenches in the works. It's using a new socket type, which means we'll need a new motherboard to support it. It also supports DDR4 RAM. No self-respecting future-proofed PC should be without the latest in speedy memory, but that'll inflate the price of our build further still.
The Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 motherboard, We've also picked an unlocked processor, That's what the "K" at the end of the processor's name means, An unlocked processor means we can overclock (manually speeding up the card's internal processor beyond that intended by the manufacturer) if we want even more power, You might actually be able to get away with an even less powerful CPU if your graphics card is up to snuff, but if your goal is future-proofing, you'll want to aim higher, For a mini PC build, you'll notice we still recommend an older i5-4690K chip, There are two reasons for that, First, we weren't able to find a small motherboard for Intel's newer Skylake processors with enough user reviews for us to trust it, Second, we iphone 8 plus champagne sheer glam case figured if you're going to build a mini PC, you'll probably pick liquid cooling to keep it quiet, and if you're going with liquid cooling you might as well take advantage of the ability to easily overclock that CPU, too, If you're ever a few frames short of the 90 fps you need to feel comfortable in VR, it could come in handy..
Why no AMD CPUs? VR experts told us that right now, they're not up to snuff when it comes to something called single-threaded performance, which is how fast the processor can work on any single tiny task put in front of it. RAM is fairly cheap, and more RAM generally means your PC can do more things at once before it bogs down. You'll want a bare minimum of 8GB of DDR3 ($40, £30, roughly AU$55). VR game developers tell us that more than 8GB is probably overkill for now. Our future-proofed rig is going a different route: we used a single 16GB stick of DDR4 RAM ($90, £70, roughly AU$120). DDR4 RAM is fairly new, and pricier than DDR3, but it's required for newer processors. 16GB will give us plenty of oomph for now, and we can easily double it to 32GB as prices come down.
