One of the biggest questions when you’re getting into virtual reality is “What type of PC should I get?” VR is driving the upper limits of the required technical specifications of the GPU and CPU, and an off-the-shelf solution may not have enough horsepower to drive a good VR experience at 1080p at 75Hz for DK2 and 1440p+ at 90Hz for CV1.

This podcast explores the biggest questions and tradeoffs for building your VR rig, and has lots of amazing insights shared by AltSpaceVR’s community manager and VR evangelist Cymatic Bruce, and Kite & Lightning‘s developer John Starr Dewar.

This is Cymatic Bruce’s budget build for around $1100 using some salvaged parts from previous builds.

This is what AltSpaceVR’s VR rig of “The Beast” was based upon for around $2100.

This is the mobile VR rig within a Pelican suitcase that John built, which drove some interesting component decisions and a cost of around $2900. Here’s a photo set of John’s VR rig build

I configured a Falcon Northwest Tiki with all of the high-end, recommended components along with a TB SSD & 2TB HDD, and the price was around $3,257. (I’m not sure if the motherboard would support an upgrade to 2 video cards when and if that becomes possible). EDIT: John says, “That’s a mini itx board so it can only take one card. They actually use an L-bracket adapter from silverstone so that the card will be mounted parallel to the motherboard instead of perpendicular to it as is normal. The case will only fit one card anyway. 600w is definitely more than you need. I have my card which is factory overclocked running at 106% tdp and I’m not having any power issues with the 450w.”

Here’s some of the questions that we tried to answer:

What tradeoffs do you make when deciding to get for each component including CPU, GPU, motherboard, cooling system, storage, power, operating system, monitor, case, optical drive, and wireless network adapter?

What’s the best machine that you can get for your money and still comfortably meet these specs?

Should you go with the higher performance and more expensive Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB GPU or the better bang-for-your-buck but less supported AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2? Spoiler alert: Most VR devs seem to prefer Nvidia, but the /r/buildapc subreddit seems to prefer AMD cards for the better performance per price but they may not know about the VR implications of going with something that’s not as well-supported.

If you’ve never built a PC before, then how do you go about navigating all of the various tradeoffs between price vs performance and portability vs heat management?

Read more discussion on Reddit here.

This is Twitter thread I mentioned where I solicit advice for building a PC. Below are a lot of links and insights and additional feedback.