Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus VR and creator of the Oculus Rift, somewhat unsurprisingly, is a fully paid-up member of the PC Master Race.

During a recent Reddit AMA Luckey was asked about the hardware specs of his PC. The first part of his response was to be expected, and probably straight out of the company's PR playbook:

I have lived on the bleeding edge of PC hardware for as long as I could scrape the money together, but for VR, I am sticking to hardware that sticks to our recommended specs: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/ That way, I get the same experience as most of my customers. I don’t want to become disconnected from the reality of how our hardware and software performs.

On the side, though, Luckey is working on something just a little bit more exciting:

As far as traditional gaming, though… I am currently working on a new PC that people might find pretty interesting. I have experimented with liquid nitrogen cooling in the past, but it is a huge pain to work with in any kind of daily use, and can also be dangerous. My new project is a very small super-powerful PC with no heatsinks and no fans - it is cooled by liquid propane, boiled into gaseous propane in an expansion block. From there, I can either compress back into a tank under high pressure, or vent out of a burner nozzle for supercooling to subzero temps. If I had more time, I would vent the propane to a small turbine generator hooked up to the PSU, but I can’t justify that kind of work right now.

In other words, it sounds like Luckey is building some kind of recirculating single-stage phase-change cooling system. There are a few commercial systems that Luckey might opt to use, or maybe he's building his own. Propane's boiling point is -42 degrees Celsius (°C), and a good single-stage phase-change system can cool a bunch of CPUs and GPUs down to around -40°C—plenty of headroom for the monstrous overclocking that is surely required to play games on the Oculus Rift.

The second step—using the boiled propane to turn a turbine that powers his PC—is a little more outlandish. Phase-change cooling is de rigueur for enthusiast overclockers; driving a tiny turbine, though... I don't think I've ever seen a build like that.

The rest of the Reddit AMA seems mostly focused on placating and educating what will probably be the Oculus Rift's key market: hardcore PC gamers. Luckey wrote about the topic of "Oculus Exclusive" games; the disparity between the £250 hype and the £500 reality of the Rift headset; some information on Oculus VR's relationship with game devs; and, most importantly, he shared a photo of his current desktop PC setup.