After months of research and debating on whether or not I wanted to spend the money on not just an Oculus Rift but a machine that would be capable of handling VR, I came across an ad that essentially made that choice for me so much easier. Recently, Oculus announced a summer sale in which you can purchase the Oculus Rift headset along with the touch controllers all for $399.00. So, what comes with this bundle? Here's what you get:
- Oculus Headset
- A set of touch controllers
- 2 Sensors
- Wireless X-Box Controller (batteries and Bluetooth dongle included)
- Note that not all of the deals out there may include the X-Box controller. Mine did, however.
- Oculus Remote
- Many retailers will throw in a game or two.
- Mine came with Eve Valkyrie, which I had zero interest in and just sold on eBay for $20.
Overall, this was a great deal.......until it came time for the PC build. I wanted something really interesting but since I am not a major gamer, I didn't need anything really outrageous. I don't play WoW, I don't do Call of Duty, Battlefield, or whatever the hottest and latest thing is. So, I could get away with a 1070 graphics card without any issues. So, off to Newegg and Amazon I went and began my build, which goes a little something like this:
- Thermaltake Core V21 Black Extreme MicroATX Cube Chassis
- MSI B250M Bazooka OPT Boost LGA 1151 Intel B250 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard with 16 GB Intel Optane Memory included and RGB LED's
- MSI GeForce GTX 1070 DirectX 12 Gaming X 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCIe SLI ready Graphics card
- Intel Core i5-7600K Kaby Lake Quad Core 3.8 GHz Processor
- Thermaltake Toughpower Grand RGB 650W Smart Zero Fan SLI/CrossFire Ready Continuous Power ATX 12V Plus Gold Certified Full Modular Power Supply
- Samsung 850 EVO M.2 2280 1TB Sata III 3-D Vertical SSD
- G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 2400 RAM
- Putting in an order for another set of these today
- Gigabyte Model GC-WB867D-I Bluetooth 4.0/Wi-Fi Expansion Card
- EVGA CLC 120 Liquid/Water CPU Cooler with 120mm Radiator, RGB LED, and EVGA Flow Control Software
- This will be upgraded soon to something much more visually appealing. I am so not finished with this project. Further in the article I will discuss my future plans.
- Windows 10 Pro
Overall, I am pleased with the build and everything works extremely well. The PC is quite fast and with the M.2 SSD, it's no wonder it's lightning fast. I have ZERO lag playing any games on the Oculus, Steam, and Origin. I've even linked it to play games on the X-Box One that sits in my daughter's room and still experience zero lag while playing Tekken 7.
As you can see, there is plenty of space on the bottom for more mods, which I intend to do. I would like a custom liquid cooling kit. Since none of the drive bays are being used, I could essentially go with a kit that utilizes the drive bays as the resorvoir/pump. I'm leaning towards something like this:
Being in the IT/Network Engineering field, cable management is essential, even at home. I like things to look neat and aesthetically pleasing. With that, baseboards were removed, wires were tucked in, Keystone wall plates and connectors were ordered, and extension cables were ordered. Here is where we ran into a bit of a problem with the Oculus Rift. The Oculus headset uses both a UBS and HDMI connection. However, if you try to extend past 6 feet with any basic cable, you will never get the headset to work. After a little research, we found that the Oculus does NOT like passive cables. In order to extend your headset past the 12 ft that is standard with your headset, you need to have ACTIVE HDMI cables. Active cables have built in chips that allow for longer runs and help push the signals the signals to run farther than your standard passive cables. I completed my setup like this:
- Active HDMI cable from HDMI on video card to a Keystone on the wall
- Active HDMI from that Keystone through the wall to another Keystone below my 60" TV
- Oculus Headset plugs into the HDMI jack on the wall under the TV.
- From the 60" TV, we ran a regular HDMI cable
- For USB, we ran SuperSpeed USB 3.0 cables from the PC to the Keystone then another Superspeed USB 3.0 through the wall to the Keystone under the TV for the 2 sensors and headset USB.
I did the same for the USB cables in order to make everything look neat and not have wires and equipment constantly in the way.
So, for those looking to take advantage of the 6 week summer Oculus deal and need some ideas, I hope this article is able to help. I know many users have had a hard time with extending the length of their headset past the 12 feet and have tried many different ways unsuccessfully. I can assure you that this is this setup works 100% and that the HDMI cables make all of the difference.
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or just want to chat, please feel free to comment or send me an email.