There was a time not long ago when just buying the PC required to power a high-end desktop VR headset cost at least $1,000. The last eight months in VR land has seen aggressive drops in pricing, culminating in this excellent deal from Microsoft which will net you a VR Ready PC and an HP VR headset together for just $750.

PlayStation VR has long held the lead in ‘all-in’ cost for a VR headset and the system to power it, with the PSVR headset and PS4 currently priced around $730. But this excellent deal from Microsoft offers up the power of higher-end PC VR at nearly the same price.

For just $750, Microsoft is offering a $400 discount on a VR Ready HP Pavilion desktop and the HP VR headset with motion controllers included, with free shipping to boot.

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The PC is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 1400 CPU, Radeon RX 580 GPU, 8GB of RAM, and a healthy 1TB HDD. The specs make the machine ‘VR Ready’, meaning it meets the recommended specs of Oculus and HTC, and qualifies as ‘Mixed Reality Ultra’ (for those paying attention to Microsoft’s VR specs).

Buying the PC and headset from Microsoft separately would run you $1,150. This is an especially good deal at the moment given that AMD’s GPUs are commanding prices significantly exceeding their MSRP.

This deal has outlasted both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but it isn’t clear how much longer it will last.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Brandodactyl

    If I wanted to switch the video card out for an Nvidia GTX 1080 later, could I do that with this hardware? I’m seriously considering this one.

    • Tyriel

      yes of course, it’s a regular case, you just take out the 580 and put the 1080 in :)

      • Brandodactyl

        So there wouldn’t be any conflict with the motherboard or some other hardware in this configuration? I’m inexperienced with gaming hardware as you can tell and the great price has me skeptical about the extensibility.

        • Kenneth Mahan

          should be fine. You might need to add a powersupply but it might be ok

          • K.C. Marsh

            One thing I would be wary of with HP pre-mades (or any other pre-made PCs) is whether or not they use any proprietary parts that can’t easily be swapped out. We had some very expensive HP Towers and wanted to put VR compatible graphics cards in them. The stock power supplies were too weak and when we went to replace the Power Supply, surprise, proprietary HP connection to the motherboard making it impossible to swap out and thus, we could not use the brand new Graphics Card. There’s nothing wrong with “all-in-one” solutions by manufacturers but you can run into trouble from time to time. Whey they did this is a mystery to me but after calling our HP rep it really seemed it was because they wanted to recommend a whole new (more expensive) PC system to me.

          • K.C. Marsh

            To that end you might be better off with one online outfits that make custom gaming rigs. You’d still want to make sure all the parts could be swapped out easily but I feel like they would be less likely to pull the proprietary parts shenanigans. If anyone out there has more experience with that in particular please chime in.

        • dk

          https://pcpartpicker.com/b/Vn8Ycf u should get something like this…..or this with a gtx 1080 ….if u go to a pc store and ask how much it will be to put something like this together most of the time it will be less than a pc from a company like dell or whatever

        • yag

          Sometimes it’s the bios of the pre-made PC which can prevent you from changing stuff… So you are better off making a little search on the web before buying.

    • brandon9271

      The power supply should be fine. From what I’ve seen on Tom’s hardware and Guru3d the rx580 draw about 220 Watts and the TDP of the GTX 1080 is about 180w. I would still call them to be sure though

  • AndyP

    Fit a SSD, ASAP.