The much expected Oculus Rift and Rift Bundle preorders are now available, after a very long, drawn out wait, filled with nothing but snippets, teasers and preliminary checks. While the virtual reality headset itself has been up for preorder for a fair amount of time, it hadn’t yet come in the bundled version – together with gaming PCs, controllers, remotes and so on.
The reasoning behind the company’s decision to start selling the bundles was fairly easy to understand. Virtual technology is certainly the next big step in what gaming – but not only resuming itself to that – has to offer or where it’s heading. And because the technology itself still requires an external engine to run it all, for example, just getting an Oculus Rift VR set alone may not allow you to begin enjoying it right away.
Just earlier this year, the Oculus Rift website was made host to a new tool for potential buyers that involved a program that would make an assessment of the computer you are running it from to figure out whether you can use a virtual reality headset with it or not. And to the regular, casual, non-gamer person, the specifications that you need to pack up in a PC in order to have the Oculus Rift work on it aren’t exactly something that easily achievable.
To the avid gamer, the specs needed won’t exceed the ‘average’ status, however.
Some of the bundles that the Oculus Rift comes in take the overzealous leap of packing in the finest technology that one can find and end up with a directly proportional price tag on it. Therefore, one of the most expensive versions of bundles you can find goes all the way up to $3,000. However, if you’re happy to stick to a very basics, Oculus VR comes packed with various PCs set up by Dell, Alienware and Asus.
Therefore, a basic PC plus Oculus Rift virtual reality headset bundle that includes the very basics that one needs in order to run VR games and experiences will cost you $1,499. For that amount of money you will get an Intel Core i5 Skylake processor, 8 GB of DDR4 RAM, the Nvidia GeForcce GTX 970 video card, as well as 1TB of storage space on a regular SATA drive. Surprisingly, the much more expensive version of the bundle doesn’t include exponentially more powerful hardware than the lower end version.
Regardless, the Oculus Rift was made to function on both PC and consoles, so if you’re already the owner of one, you should expect support for it to come in a timely manner too.
The Oculus Rift alone costs $599 and will start being shipped out on March 28th.
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