Quote Originally Posted by Gforced View Post
Well I meant since this a build thread, people building a pc now maybe doing it in order to prepare for VR. I know as soon as the NVidia 10 series is out I am buying one and hopefully fall into some money for a vive. That rand rate is killing me.
In the absolute simplest of terms, the bare minimum required to run the VIVE or Rift :

You need a GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290 or better that's jacked into a PCIE ×16 (preferably a v3.0+) slot on your MB.
You will need blazingly fast RAM and you'll need 8GB of that to boot. Depending on your motherboard i'd suggest either 2 x 4GB or 4x2GB modules.
You will need a bucket load (3 x USB 3.0 and 1 x USB 2.0) ports available. I'd suggest getting a USB3.0 PCIE host card to add a couple more USB3.0 ports to your system.

Then you'll also need a fast CPU, i5-4590 or better.

That's the only way you'll get any form of decent performance here.

The big difference between the Oculus (USB Ports : 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port) and Vive (USB port: 1x USB 2.0 or better port)

Will likely be the diffrentiator as both require HDMI ports on your graphics hardware. Judging by some quick calculations the Oculus seems like the better of the two, but the Vive seems like the more practical. Either way, since this is 1st Gen hardware, we'll have to wait and see which one survives the 1st Generation and who steps up from Gen 2+

Title wise we'll have to also wait and see, because cool hardware sans any real world use for it or limited real world use tends to die off over time. Take IEEE 1394/Firewire as an example. It had better performance 1st Gen had 400 Mbit/s full-duplex vs USB 1.0's 12 Mbit/s. USB won irrespective of how fast Firewire was, it won because it was cheaper and just worked better. Btw, Firewire was plug and play, but had a terrible tendency to fry peripherals if you're not safely removing them and just yanking them out at times.

Fun fact is that Thunderbolt is even faster than USB 3.0 and is only starting to gain traction, but i'm still doubtful if it will gain much of a market share over USB at this stage. People know USB and hopefully the fact that Thunderbolt uses USB-C connectors and allows USB devices to run on the thunderbolt port will make this transition simpler.