Today is the big day – the first Oculus Rift consumer version (CV1)s have arrived to their owners homes. If you were one of the lucky few, well we’re all insanely jealous but we’ve also got some tips for you. If your PC rig isn’t quite up to snuff we’ve got some hardware suggestions for you – from processors to video cards we want our readers to be prepared for the VR future.
GPUs
Whether you are entering the world of Virtual Reality for the first time or finally taking home an Oculus Rift after trying one at a trade show, you’re going to need some serious horsepower to play the likes of Eve: Valkyrie and other Oculus CV1 compatible titles.
Here are our top picks for VR Ready GPUs for your latest build:
ZOTAC Geforce 980 AMP
The ZOTAC Geforce 980 AMP takes things one step further than the recommended specs with an impressive 2048 rendering cores, 4GB of DDR5 memory to hold all of the latest HD graphics, it is SLI ready, DX 12 compliant and NVidia VR certified. Don’t let that price tag scare you, if you’re serious about experiencing VR with all of the bells and whistles this might be the card for you.
EVGA Geforce 970 4GB FTW Edition
Keeping things a little closer to the recommended specs, EVGA’s Geforce 970 4GB FTW Edition will fit the bill nicely for anyone looking to enter virtual reality without breaking the bank. Featuring 1664 CUDA Cores, a 1165MHZ core clock speed and SLI ready this graphics card will still get the job done on those awesome Oculus Rift launch games. It also boasts the same 4GB of video memory found in more expensive cards, making it perfect for a first enthusiast VR build.
Processors
The processor is the brains of your computer, it handles everything from number crunching to communicating with the various parts of your motherboard. Entering the world of Oculus is going to require at least an Intel i5-4590. Below we’ve got some options for you!
Intel i5-4590
Oculus’ recommended processor is the Intel i5-4590 which packs 6MB of L3 Cache and a clock speed of 3.3GHZ. With four cores it’ll manage to chew through most of the VR ready titles that you can throw at it. Amazon.com is currently offering this processor for $199, which is quite reasonable considering how expensive CPUS can get. There is also a bundle available for $348.99 USD which includes an SSD.
Intel i7-4790K
If you want a faster processor that might be a little more future proof we’re recommending the i7-4790K with its 8MB of Cache and 4.4GHZ clock speed. Rocking 4 cores this processor is still going to meet the minimum requirement for games years from now, and it should do perfect for a VR ready build.
If you’re wondering if your build is powerful enough, even after upgrading, here are the official specs from Oculus:
NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
8GB+ RAM
Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
2x USB 3.0 ports
Windows 7 SP1 or newer