Oculus has partnered with Asus, Alienware, and Dell to provide a number of ‘Oculus Ready’ badged systems to VR fans looking to jump head first into the world high-end virtual reality gaming. The all-inclusive Rift/PC bundle will be available for pre-order in February at $1499.
Oculus today started taking pre-orders for the long awaited Oculus Rift, the company’s first consumer-grade VR headset for use with PC. If you’ve already thrown your chips in the $599 headset, your next bet would be to pump up the specs on your gaming rig. Don’t have one? Well, Oculus has a solution for you that’s guaranteed to meet the recommended specs.
Although exact details aren’t available on the individual ‘Oculus Ready’ rigs, they’ll be aiming to meet or surpass the company’s recommend specs:
- Graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 equivalent or greater
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- Memory: 8GB+ RAM
- Output: Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
- Input: 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port
- Operating system: Windows 7 SP1 64 bit or newer
If you already pre-ordered an Oculus Rift, the company is promising you’ll be able to tack on an ‘Oculus Ready’ PC bundle at the same special price without changing your Rift ship date.
No international currency amounts have yet been announced by Oculus for the ‘Oculus Ready’ PC bundle.
If you’re looking for alternatives in the meantime, NVIDIA is also working with PC hardware manufacturers on a new certification program, dubbed ‘GTX Geforce VR Ready’, which aims to deliver an ‘at a glance’ guide for consumers to decide if hardware they’re looking to purchase is capable of providing a good VR experience or not. The program will essentially designate hardware as ‘Oculus/HTC Vive Ready’, as both headsets require more or less the same minimum specs to run.
We’ll be following the ‘Oculus Ready’ program as the yet unspecified February pre-order date nears.
Also check out Road to VR’s own Exemplar PC built in partnership with AVADirect, a rig that will most certainly give you the much needed horse power to get where you’re going in the Metaverse. The pre-configured Exemplar far from the cheapest rig out there, but is designed to exceed the minimum recommendations by a healthy margin.
