When the Oculus summer sale started, I immediately went and purchased one online. For that price, I just had to, it was too good to pass up on. The TL:DR is: best impulse purchase ever!

One thing I didn’t have though was a PC to run VR. The PC I currently had was 8 years old, running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of DDR2 RAM and an ATI Radeon 4850. All of that attached to an Intel board that didn’t have any USB 3.0 ports. The newest thing in the PC was a 250GB SSD that I got in 2015. So I had to build a new PC, since the only thing I could reuse was the SSD and the case.

My final build list ended up being this:

  • Ryzen 5 1400 (3.2 GHz base/3.4GHz boost)
  • MSI B350 Tomahawk
  • EVGA GTX 1070
  • Corsair 8GB DDR4 @ 2400MHz
  • EVGA 750W power supply

The build came together flawlessly. The only thing that bugs me a bit is that the B350 takes a while to complete the POST, adding quite a few seconds to the boot time. Otherwise it’s a good motherboard, and the BIOS interface is awesome. Here’s a picture of the final build:

Image of inside of the PC, showing the graphics card and other internal components

The PSU in that pic is still my old 450W one. My first few VR sessions only lasted 15-20mins because the PSU would shutdown; the GTX 1070 was drawing too much power. After putting in the 750W PSU, I haven’t had a single random shutoff while playing VR.

Another great thing about this PC is that it’s really quiet, especially compared to the previous build that was in this case. The stock fan that comes with the Ryzen is silent, much better than the stock intel fan I was using. Even after long VR sessions, the PC is humming along quietly, not stressing at all. Overall a great VR PC build!