In just a few short years, we’ve gone from a world with no virtual reality headsets (or at least, no good virtual reality headsets), to a world where it every man and his dog is making some sort of head-mounted display. There’s PlayStation VR for the cool kids that like having a small London nightclub strapped to their faces; the HTC Vive for the nerds that want to look some sort of HR Giger nightmare; and even Google Cardboard, a sort of Fisher Price “my first VR” for the tech curious.

But let’s say for a moment you aren’t flush with cash like, say, a doctor or a YouTuber with a gambling website. You can’t buy all the VR headsets, so what do you do then? Fortunately, we at Ars Technica have been sliding our sweaty foreheads into the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR, Samsung Gear VR, and Google Cardboard for months now. So much so that we think it’s about time to give you a hard, once-and-for-all, definitive, totally serious buyers guide for the best VR headset for you.

Which is to say that with so much choice in VR right now, there’s pretty much a headset out there for everybody regardless of budget, space, or the kind of experience you’re after. We rounded up five of the most compelling headsets in the video above and put them through some serious, and not-so-serious testing to to bring you our verdict on the best headsets. If you’d rather read some text than watch a video, we’ve got you covered below too.

Set up: Easy on mobile, tough on PC

Both Google Cardboard and Gear VR use your smartphone as an all-in-one VR display, tapping into its various sensors—accelerometers, cameras, and gyroscopes mostly—to let you look around a 3D game, or circle a 360-degree movie. This is different to the full 3D positional tracking of tethered headsets, but the flip side is that setup is super-easy. With the Gear VR you simply slide your Samsung phone (Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6/S6 Edge/S6 Edge+, or Galaxy S7/S7 Edge) into the housing, load up an app (or the Oculus launcher) and strap it to your face. From there you can easily browse for content with minimal fuss.

Google Cardboard is a little trickier in that many of the cheaper versions (£5/$5) require assembly first, but I wouldn’t recommend buying those at all if you can afford it. Paying slightly more for a £10/$10 plastic version saves you the headache of assembly, and it’ll last much longer. There’s a Cardboard section on the Google Play store that list all the compatible apps.

PSVR

Headset specs Headset weight 610 grams (1.34 lbs, excluding cable) Display 1920×1080 (960×1080 per eye) full RGB panel Refresh rate Up to 120Hz (90Hz on many games) Field of view ~100 degrees Controllers DualShock 4; PlayStation Move controllers (required for some games) Head Tracking Six-axis motion sensing system (three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer). Requires PlayStation Camera. Audio 3.5 mm audio jack on cord, built-in microphone PS4 connection 143x36x143mm Processor Unit integrating HDMI, USB and power connections. Included games Demo disc with 18 titles Price £350/€400. No bundles announced yet. (US has a $500 bundle with required Camera, two PlayStation Move controllers, and PlayStation VR Worlds game)

New kid on the block PSVR is the easiest of the tethered headsets to set up, thanks in part to using the PlayStation 4 for its graphical chops. There are no graphics card drivers to install, or compatibility issues to worry about—everything just works. You plug the PSVR’s external processing box (which splits the HDMI signal, allowing another person to view what you’re doing in VR on a TV) into the PS4 via USB, plug the PS4 into that, run another cable out to your TV, plug the PlayStation Camera into the PS4, and then let the system download and install the relevant software. The whole process is seamless, and relatively short, depending in your broadband connection.

The only annoyance is that the cable for the camera is far too short if you have your PS4 positioned away from the TV. In my living room, for instance, the TV is wall mounted with HDMI cables chased into the wall, running down to an AV amplifier and cupboard. In order to use PSVR I currently have to move the PS4 out of the cupboard in order for the camera to be in a decent position to track the PSVR headset and Move controllers. Hopefully someone will make an extension cable soon that will solve the problem, but it’s something to bear in mind if you like keeping your consoles tucked away.



Oculus Rift

Headset specs Display 2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye) OLED panels Refresh rate 90 Hz Field of view 110 degrees Lens spacing 58-72mm (adjustable) Controllers Xbox One gamepad and Oculus Remote (both included) Head Tracking 3-axis gyroscope, accelerometer, and external "Constellation" IR camera tracking system Audio Integrated over-ear headphones with 3D directional audio support and built-in microphone PC connection 4m custom cable (integrates HDMI and USB connections) Included games Lucky's Tale (and Eve Valkyrie with pre-order) Price £500/$600

Onto the PC-based headsets, and this is where things start getting tricky. While Oculus does try and make the setup process as simple as possible, it is rather drawn out, and many users have run into problems. Oculus requires two USB 3.0 ports (it won’t work via USB 2.0); one for its tracking camera and another for the headset. Plus, you’ll need a spare HDMI socket on your graphics card, which at a minimum needs to be an Nvidia GTX 960 or AMD RX 480, along with an Intel i3-6300 CPU or better. Most graphics cards only have one HDMI output these days, which means you’ll need to find another way to hook up your PC display if that’s plugged in via HDMI.

Once you’ve plugged in the USB camera and the headset you can download the Oculus installer, which then downloads a lot of software. The process is largely automated, but it took around 25 minutes to get everything downloaded and set up (and that’s on a fast office Internet connection). Even then, that only got me to the Oculus app, which then asked me to update the firmware on the headset, and then asked me to update the drivers for my USB 3.0 ports. If you’re new to PC gaming, also bear in mind that you’ll need to keep on top of driver releases from Nvidia and AMD, which can make a dramatic difference to performance.

All that said, once Oculus is set up, it doesn’t need much babysitting, and it worked flawlessly for me every time I came back to it. If you do get stuck, support is good, with a dedicated site and plenty of frequently asked questions to browse.

HTC Vive

Headset specs Headset weight 555 grams (~1.2 lbs) without cables Display 2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye) AMOLED panels Refresh rate 90 Hz Field of view 110 degrees Lens spacing 60.2-74.5mm (adjustable) Controllers Two wireless motion-tracked controllers with rechargeable 960mAh batteries Tracking SteamVR 1.0 tracking system with two "Lighthouse" IR laser tracking boxes (up to 5m diagonal tracking volume) Audio Audio extension dongle to plug generic headphones to headset. Built-in microphone PC connection Three-part multi-cable (HDMI, USB, and power) with junction box for PC connection. Included games Job Simulator, Fantastic Contraption and Tiltbrush Price £759/$799

Setting up the HTC Vive is largely the same, although, you can use DisplayPort instead of HDMI to hook up the headset, and you need to find a place for the tracking boxes on a wall or on a tripod, each of which requires a wall outlet for power. You also need to install Steam, which in theory should detect that the HTC Vive is plugged in and offer to install Steam VR and the relevant drivers. This isn’t always the case, though, and using the Vive on certain systems I had to manually tell Steam I wanted to use Steam VR.

Once that’s done, you then need to decide whether you’re using the Vive at “room scale” or you have a smaller space. Using the latter limits the number of games you can play, and really room scale games are the whole reason to buy the Vive. From there you need to tell Steam where the display is by pointing at it with a controller, where the floor is by laying the controllers on the floor, and then tracing around your available space to set up the virtual boundaries that prevent you from walking into a wall or a piece of furniture.

After that you can play, but that assumes everything works the first time. I’ve found the HTC Vive to be extremely temperamental, with tracking boxes randomly not syncing, or controllers disappearing. A restart or a firmware update usually fixes the problem, but it’s definitely a frustration when all you want to do is play. That’s not to mention that support isn’t great, with most of the useful information buried away on Steam’s forums, rather than in official, well written help documents.