That may change in the future if CPU-intensive AAA games descend on the Vive and Rift in droves-though DirectX 12’s expanded multi-core capabilities could help on that front, as the FX-6350 packs six cores.ĪMD powers about a quarter of all PCs connected to Steam, and chips like the FX-6350 and FX-8350 ($146 on Amazon) are beloved by PC gamers on a budget. The most exciting part of this whole endeavor was discovering that yes, despite being a bit long in the tooth and nowhere near as powerful as Intel’s Core i5 processors in a vacuum, the people’s champion FX-6350 is utterly capable of handling virtual reality workloads. That’s almost half the cost of the $1,000 many people cite for a VR-ready PC. ![]() If you find a $200 Radeon RX 480 and follow the tweaks above you could conceivably drive the final cost of the PC down to $550 or so before a Windows license. If you shop around, just make sure your replacement meets the requirements of the VR headset you plan on using-namely, the Oculus Rift requires a pair of available USB 3.0 ports. The Gigabyte GA-970-Gaming motherboard’s color scheme looks great inside the Spec-Alpha, but you can find a ton of decent AM3+ motherboards for around $50.You can save $10 on the memory by choosing Kingston’s 2x4GB HyperX Fury kit ($36 on Amazon) instead.If you have a spare hard drive already hanging around, opt for a 120GB SSD like the OCZ Trion 150 ($45 on Amazon) as a boot drive rather than the $65, 240GB Corsair model AMD recommends.That alone could compensate for the extra RX 480 cost, depending on which model of the graphics card you manage to snag. I personally enjoy the angular “gamer aesthetic” of the $80 Spec-Alpha case, but using something like Corsair’s own Carbide Spec-01 ($48 on Amazon) would save you $30.I wouldn’t change much about it, frankly.īut if sticking to that $650 price matters more to you than aesthetics, you can reclaim some of the budget eaten up by the unexpectedly high street pricing for the Radeon RX 480. So AMD’s $650 VR-ready PC does what it sets out to do, and thanks to the color coordination between the Corsair Spec-Alpha case, the Gigabyte motherboard, and Radeon’s own red branding, it manages to look damned finewhile doing so. Like I said: Experiencing virtual reality with AMD’s $650 PC feels great. It didn’t deliver the game’s floating jelly ball to its pink goal. If there’s a weak spot in this build, it’s that affordable but years-old FX-6350 chip. Most of the first wave of VR games lean more heavily on GPUs than CPUs, though, and the Radeon RX 480 is a relative beast. Experiencing VR with AMD’s $650 PC feels great, full stop. I experienced some very slight hitching the first time I played fetch with The Lab’s dog, but was never able to reproduce it. Through it all, AMD’s DIY rig delivered a rock-solid virtual reality experience free of jarring frames drops and stuttering, no matter how quickly I whirled my head around or how hot and heavy the onscreen action became. Petting and playing fetch with The Lab’s cute robo-dog proved curiously satisfying, while Elite: Dangerous’ impressive universe became downright awe-inspiring armed with the Vive and HOTAS flight stick. Audioshield’s frenetic action left me literally feeling the music-and physically wrecked. I gasped as a gigantic, majestic whale almost swiped me with its tail in theBlu. I marveled as the Millennium Falcon swooped mere feet above my head in Star Wars: Trial on Tatooine. ![]() And we’ll get into ways to shave more pennies off the total after looking at how this rig actually runs. That’ll cost you another $110, bringing the grand total for this PC closer to $800 in real life, assuming you already have a keyboard, mouse, and monitor on-hand-still a relative steal for a VR-ready machine. Sure, Microsoft lets you install and use Windows 10 without a product key, but you’ll still need to buy a license and activate it to be legal. You’ll also need Windows, since neither the Oculus Rift nor the HTC Vive support Linux yet. In reality, you’re more likely to spend closer to $250 on a 4GB Radeon RX 480. Your best bet is to use to track which models are available at any given time. XFX’s $240 Radeon RX 480 with a custom backplate is the cheapest card you can actually buy on Newegg right now. The most affordable version online is the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480 at $230 on Newegg, and it pretty much hasn’t been in stock since we reviewed it. Reference models of the 4GB RX 480 disappeared immediately after launch, and all 4GB RX Radeons have been in short supply since. First of all, Radeon RX 480s simply don’t exist at AMD’s ballyhooed $200 price point.
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