Experiencing virtual reality at least once is something we recommend you do at least once in your life. Especially when faced with certain genres like car simulation. A good racing setup combined with a PC capable of running VR games is simply a day-to-night experience. And not only in this genre, but in many others. That’s why we thought to build the cheapest PC for virtual reality todaybut at the same time are not below specifications.
Virtual reality is not a new concept, however, despite multiple attempts, it has yet to take off in the mass market and there is still a long way to go to solve the technological problems it encounters. . That’s not to say it’s bad, just like early 3D maps compared to what we have now. However, the barrier is the price. In a few months, SONY will launch its PS VR 2, which will be the cheapest option to take advantage of this support in a decent way. And yes, we know there are units like the Met’s Oculus Quest 2 that work on their own, but are limited by the power of their mobile phone hardware.
What happens in a PC ready for virtual reality?
From the outset you have to think that a virtual reality headset literally puts a screen in front of your eyes, this means that if the distance between the pixels is very large, then we will see black holes from one pixel to another . What does this imply ? Games need to be played at high resolution, which means having graphics power available. At the same time there is the concept of photon movement or telepresence, where the whole process from when we press a button to when we see the image through our retina must be less than 20 milliseconds.
And as we’ve said many times, we’re not talking about 20ms in the sense of 50 FPS, but the whole process, including screen delivery. It is therefore common for VR games to run at 90, 120 and even 240 FPS. Which means sacrificing graphic detail in the style of Ray Tracing and special effects. All this to gain the greatest possible immersion when using our Oculus Rift, HTC Vice or Valve Index.
So you should be aware from the start that despite the fact that we wanted to build the cheapest PC possible, we also wanted something functional. It is not enough for us that it meets the specifications, since we consider that it is a waste of money. That said, let’s move on to what really interests us.
Setting
- The announcement of Resident Evil VIII for VR, a game that requires 8 cores to run, made us rule out the various options with a lower spec. We therefore opted for the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X from AMD as the main processor of our system.
- As for the motherboard, our choice falls on the ASUS Prime B550M-K.
- As RAM memory, a Corsair double kit consisting of 8 GB DDR4-3200 modules each for a total of 16.
- The choice of graphics card is a AMD RX6600specifically an ASUS Dual with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.
- And WD BLACK SN850 1TB SSD capacity with PCIe 4.0 interface for storage.
- As a PC case, we opted for a NFortec Nervia.
- Concerning the food we chose a Seasonic G12 GC-650 80 Plus Gold.
As for the choice of virtual reality headset, keyboard, monitor and mouse for this PC for VR, we leave the choice to you.
