Go huge and high res imo

1440p is about as sharp as human eyes can perceive on Windows, not because we can't tell the difference between 4k and 1440p videos or images, but because Windows sucks at scaling and 4k monitors end up looking significantly worse day to day.

You want high brightness, RGB coverage, and high refresh rate. Once you get used to high refresh rates, 60hz looks like crap.

The primary reason I haven't gone back to two monitors is because 27" monitors take up way too much room. Two of them won't really fit on my desk without significant moving things around.

They make stands that can clamp to your desk and hold two monitors. They’re pretty nice actually.

Ugh, I have 24" monitors.
Think that's gonna screw up my budget

Bought a laptop for general work and home stuff 2-3 years ago and am already looking to get another. It was a good deal at $400 from one of the office stores and was pretty nice for a while, but it's literally falling apart and is kind of a piece of ****.

So, I was thinking this time, I'd go up into the $600-$700 range - wouldn't be going nuts and breaking the bank, but I could get something solid. I've seen there are actually "gaming" laptops around this price range in some Black Friday deals. It wouldn't be bad to have another PC that could run some games.

Anyway, to my point, my wife has it in her head that it would fun to surprise our kids with some VR. My soon-to-be 9-year old has been begging for it since he first heard about VR, but I've had to teach him about waiting for prices to go down and for technology to mature. My wife saw an Oculus Rift bundle at Best Buy: $400 for the Rift + Touch and 6 games.

I had to inform her than neither of our desktop PC's can handle it (did budget gaming builds 2 and 3 years ago). What I was thinking, though, was that maybe if I splurged a bit on the laptop, added one or two hundred bucks to what I was looking at, I could get one that I could of course use for work and what-not but that we could also use with a Rift.

I know where to go for the minimum specs and all. I was wondering if anyone thought that might be a decent idea since I'm in the market for a laptop, anyway, and, if so, if anyone had suggestions. I'd love to come in sub-1000, if possible, - hopefully that's not too naively optimistic.

The other thought - if we were serious about VR - would be maybe jumping on one of the Black Friday PS4 deals and then buying the VR kit. My hesitancy there is that I don't really want to start spending tons of money on PS4 games when we have lots of PC games and they can usually be gotten on the cheap. I also have no idea if PS4 VR is any good. Plus, the laptop is multi-purpose.

Thoughts? Thanks!

EDIT: I should add that I read that Oculus is coming out with Oculus Go in 2018, which is a kit that doesn't require a PC and will only be $200. Perhaps it might be worth it to just wait for that?

What about having the kids "play around" with the smartphone based VR solutions until the market matures a little more?

I would do that except we don't have phones that can do VR. Our smartphones are decent, but they don't have gyroscopes.

That's a really good idea, though. I'm on MetroPCS and they have a new ZTE phone that's reasonably priced that perhaps I could upgrade to.

no phone can do worthwhile VR yet, unless it's "certain videos" you're interested in and I should think those are not for the kids! If it doesn't do positional tracking, it isn't really VR imo, it's just surround 3D (and sometimes not even that in the case of 360 videos).

The upcoming PSVR Skyrim black friday bundle at $349 is a huge bargain. The PSVR isn't quite as good as the PC ones, but it's approaching them. Especially if you're cheaping out on the PC, which is their biggest advantage.

The levels go something like this:

Vive > Rift >> PSVR >>>>>>>>>>> Samsumg S7 or greater >>> S6 >>>>>>> other phones.

Maybe the new google daydream phones are comparable to samsung, I don't know.

As far as I know, Oculus Go is merely a Galaxy S8 (edit: LCD screen so worse than S7) welded to the headset, without the ability to make calls. HTC Vive have one coming out too, the "vive focus" - which claims it can do positional tracking - but no idea what it'll cost or when.

Ahh pron, the old reliable of tech innovation.

Basically look for laptop 1070 or desktop 1060 for VR ready.

I'm going to try to go the el cheapo VR route and just do the phone thing. My kids tried it at a friend's house and loved it, so I think this will satisfy their longing for now.

MetroPCS has a new phone, the ZTE Blade Z Max, that is supposed to be a fantastic phone at its price point ($180 retail, but I can get it at the Metro PCS store for $99). Clearly not as good as the top Samsungs of the world, but every review I've seen is that it's a ridiculous bang for the buck.

Called the store, they said it could do VR (which I figured, looking at the specs), and that I would just need a universal headset that could handle a 6" phone. I'll look into a couple controllers, too, of course.

If the VR experience sucks but the phone is good, I'll still use it as a phone upgrade (I have a ZTE Zmax 2, which was an amazing deal at $60) and let my kids play with my old phone. So worst case, I get a nice new phone and my kids learn a lesson about the benefits of waiting for technology to mature and prices to go down.

Thanks for the tips.

By the way, the Oculus Rift package that I mentioned earlier is $349 today online on Best Buy's website.

I'm being tempted to upgrade my computer a little to gain a bit more of a better performance on the games I play which are CSGO, PUBG and fornite.

I was thinking about upgrading my whole set up but its far to expensive for me to do this right now. So I'm looking at Video Cards and RAM.

RAM I'm fine with. The Video card is what I'm here about. Right now I have a pretty dated card EVGA - GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked. I'm looking at between a 1050 GTX to a 1070. Would I feel the boost in performance if I went from what I have now to one of these or is it not worth it as my other computers would be hindering it from performing too much.

Here are my other specs.

Intel - Core i5-4460 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor
ASRock - H97M PRO4 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
Corsair - Vengeance LP 8GB (2 x 4GB) RAM
Crucial - 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD
EVGA - GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked Video Card
NZXT - Source 220 ATX Mid Tower Case
XFX - 550W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply
Asus - DRW-24F1ST DVD/CD Writer
Windows 10 Home

Also off topic questions, How much would you guys be looking to get for my PC specs above if you wanted to sell on ebay or something similar?

If your kids are into Java Minecraft, here's a VR version that works with any VR device. Run Trinus on the phone/PC. Works best with a USB connection.

http://www.vivecraft.org/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...ai.trinus.full

Oh, And if you're looking for another inexpensive phone option: You can find Unlocked Droid Turbo 2's pretty cheap. Great OLED screen and good resolution (1440 x 2560 pixels).

I bought two of these for my kids a few months ago. They look brand new:
Ebay Reconditioned Droid Turbo 2 $120

Price may go down even further on Black Friday with Ebay promos...

Is Java Minecraft the "classic" version of PC Minecraft, meaning not Minecraft for Windows 10? If so, yes, they are into that. They are a bit more into Roblox right now, but VR Minecraft would definitely throw them back into that game.

Thanks for the advice.

EDIT: The more I think about this, the more I think this is going to be a bad idea for all this to be on MY phone (if I get it). I guess we'll have to learn what "setting limits" means.


EDIT 2: Ok, Trinus looks awesome.

Yes, classic minecraft.

coolcoolcool

United,

A 1070 is probably overkill for your current system.

Absurd black friday bargain for a VR-ready PC + headset: $669!

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-omen...735a8b63a50INT

Yeah I thought so, Think I will be better trying to pick up a new system whilst black friday is going on my system is really dated now.

Meh, i would buy a better GPU without upgrading everything. What resolution do you run? If it's 1080p just get gpu.

I dunno. 4th gen i5 may be long in the tooth these days. Makes me think the other specs ain’t great, like RAM speed for instance. Plus the chipset is quite dated.

Edit

Googled it, guess h97 was 2014, so somewhat old.

Nah.

I was running 2nd gen i7 until a few months ago and a friend is still on a 1st gen i5 with a 1060. Any modernish cpu is fine unless you have a specific need for something.

Just pulled the trigger on this power supply + GTX 1080 TI - I will be messing around with some machine learning stuff that can make use of GPUs as well, so not holding back, it's only money.

I'm getting the Samsung Odyssey headset - I'm more interested in VR application development than hardcore games and also interested in VR for general computing (understand it's not really mature enough yet), so figured Windows MR is the way to go for now. Hopefully there will be some SteamVR titles available as well.