What's the best bang for the buck out there now?

[Arjai]

I am new to VR, just set up a gaming PC, not much but, that steam says is ready (via the steam vr app). I have an old A-10 6700 with a Power Color 580 Red Dragon. I briefly looked on Amazon and was surprised that the VR headsets, that I saw, were in the $500 range!

Are there any deals I should look for? perhaps an older model that will still work well? I am hoping to find something around $200, or less. I have a small apartment and basically want to veg out on the couch for a few hours a week.

I would like to see what my setup can do, but do not want to buy something that is cheap and won't last. Yet, at the same time cannot affords to go all out with a $500 headset.

I am hoping some of you that are more familiar with the equipment can help me out with this.

Thanks!

 

[sepheronx]

Best bet is to wait for Black Friday.

Dell has their own model as well. Maybe you can keep an eye on their prices as every now and then, Dell puts out decent sales on their peripherals

Edit: OK dells is just a rebranded HTC so don't bother as it's expensive. You can check out Oculus Rift S as it's cheaper ($500) in Canada so in theory it should be cheaper in US.

It's about $400US on Amazon

 

[Toothless]

I'm not 100% sure that APU can handle the processing required for VR. AFAIK newer i5s are needed at minimum.

 

[Arjai]

I thought the GPU would do most of the process, I have a rx580. The APU is just a processor, now. 2 core, 4 thread, base 3.70 GHz I have seen it Boost up to 4.24 GHz.

@Toothless plus Steam VR app says my setup is good for High to Very High in most games, w/ the test holding over 90 FPS.

 

[xkm1948]

Oh boy a VR question! Here we go!

Basically it depends on how much you would like to spend. On the lower end spectrum any of those Windows Mixed Reality HMD will do. They have the same core design and works really well with SteamVR. Basically it comes down to which one is the cheapest. I would recommend Samsung Odyssey+ if it fell around $200.

The only other option I would recommend is the new Rift S. For $399 it is a DAMN GOOD headset for the price.

Anything over $399 IMO will not be worth it unless you have huge sum of disposable income. At the top of the line you can choose between Valve Index or Wireless HTC Vive Pro. That would be all I can recommend.

That AMD APU might be pushing it. Most VR games REALLY like CPU with nice IPC and high clock speed. I would at least go with a cheap RyZen. In physics heavy games like Fallout 4 VR it will bring that APU down to its knee fast.

RX580 is OK~ish for VR. My experience with AMD GPU for VR is piss poor as their driver support is usually shitty for VR titles (for example, Google Earth VR was randomly black screen crashing due to an AMD driver update in 2017 and did not get fixed until mid 2018)


Oh that SteamVR performance test tool is BS. Even average quality score of 9.8 will have stuttering issues from time to time.

 

[Arjai]

Yea, I am thinking that I will have to wait it out, awhile. This winter I may buy a small ff board and get a 2700. Then after it eventually get's built up, get a VR headset. I have heard a lot of great things about the Rift S, and will probably get one sometime, next year.

Thanks everyone for the help, I have a bunch of more pending things to take care of but, I have a goal!

 

[DR4G00N]

If you have a good android phone and a google cardboard you can try streaming games from your pc to it. The quality is terrible of course but it'll give you a decent idea of it without shelling out a bunch of cash. I've toyed around with it for Project CARS, an interesting experience using a wheel and pedal setup with VR in cockpit view.

 

[xkm1948]

If you have a good android phone and a google cardboard you can try streaming games from your pc to it. The quality is terrible of course but it'll give you a decent idea of it without shelling out a bunch of cash. I've toyed around with it for Project CARS, an interesting experience using a wheel and pedal setup with VR in cockpit view.

what wheel and pedal setup do you have?

 

[Arjai]

If you have a good android phone and a google cardboard you can try streaming games from your pc to it. The quality is terrible of course but it'll give you a decent idea of it without shelling out a bunch of cash. I've toyed around with it for Project CARS, an interesting experience using a wheel and pedal setup with VR in cockpit view.

I played around with Google Dream, some time ago. It got my interest up but, did not have a gaming computer set up.

I won this APU in a Crunching give-away and it took me about 2 years to finally get it built, work has been sucking the life out of me, and now it looks as though I can game on it but, I will need to upgrade it before I can do any VR.

So, I had already planned to upgrade my Crunching Farm, with some 2700's and get rid of the T-3500's I have, in the interest of saving money on my power bills. I will just use one of them as my occasional VR rig, when the time comes.

 

[phanbuey]

Im not sure that VR and bang for the buck go together.

The stuff that's cheap is not good. The stuff that is OK is insanely expensive.

 

[xkm1948]

Im not sure that VR and bang for the buck go together.

The stuff that's cheap is not good. The stuff that is OK is insanely expensive.

Nah, Rift S is pretty amazing build quality and actual experience for just $399.

 

[kapone32]

I purchased a Deepon E2 several years ago for $199 and it works pretty good. The other one I have seen is the Pixma. I think there is one that was crowd funded that has 2 4K displays and sells for around $400 US.