Gadgetory

the Sun had long since fallen out of the sky by the time Josh finished giving Kyle the scoop on fractals define nano ass Kyle gave his familiar nod of approval as he admired his friends work fighting the urge to flail his arms like a marionette on speed which had long been his trademark actually he kind of nailed you there you know whatever what are the drives going this thing they're back here flushed with emotion they stared longingly into each other's eyes look the motion longingly there was no longingly okay let's let's just try to yeah right I mean okay so what else can we stuff in this thing no dials 14 slit betrayed his true emotions his heart taking over for his mind choose-your-own-adventure with the defined an OS from fractal design the case offers custom water cooling options full-size hardware support and top-class cable management and a compact design click the link in the description for more info lots of gas so but the recent launch of the RX for 80 AMD has focused heavily on bringing virtual reality to the masses by promising a VR capable graphics card at the 200 ish dollar price point meanwhile nvidia continues their use of deep learning technology to find the meaning of MSRP up until now we've been seeing VR builds popping up online ranging anywhere from 700 to 1,000 bucks which isn't exactly in reach for the majority of gamers at least when you're my height so it got me thinking as dangerous as that sounds if we were to use the RX 480 and follow the minimum recommended specs for the oculus rift and HTC vive what's the absolute least amount of money we could spend on a br Reddy PC and inevitably what kind of experience could I hope to achieve in VR poor or games well instead of building a fresh system from the ground up I instantly turn to my Black Friday bill that I put together last November for just 400 bucks I'll beat it with the help of some killer Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals the rig sported an FX 6300 eight gigs of ram and a Radeon HD 7950 packed snugly inside the fractal design core 1000 with all those holiday savings out of the picture however I had to make a few part changes to maintain the low cost of the build while hitting those minimum VR specs so I swapped out the CPU for an FX 8350 change the corsair CX power supply for an EVGA 430 while unit tossed out the g-scale RAM for some cheaper HyperX fury modules in the same capacity and of course replaced the 7950 with the rx 488 gigabyte reference model what I was left with apart from more empty retail boxes was a five hundred and fifty five dollar PC that was fully via already at least on paper and according to the 6.7 score in our steamvr performance test now if I'm being fully transparent you might think I was a ghost you might have also noticed that I swapped out the old AMD stock cooler for a fancier Wraith I had lying around but I left the CPU running at stock speeds as such this cooler swap should not affect our gaming performance I just couldn't hear myself think with the old stock cooler which I have since donated to my deaf cousin who thought it was so ugly he donated it to our deaf and blind cousin now initially I plan to overclock the AR X 480 for today's testing but after sources like Tom's hardware and PC perspective reveal that the card was drawing power significantly outside the spec of the motherboards PCIe slot I've decided to stick to stock speeds until aimed he releases a driver update to fix the issue this topic is thicker than a black man's taste in white women so if you want more info I put links to some relevant articles in the description and with that it's time to put the system through its paces so today we'll be testing five games on the vibe and another five games on the rift remember that in the best case scenario we're going to want to see an average of 90 FPS to match the refresh rate of the headset lenses and relatively consistent frame times with few irregularities of course none of that data really matters if we're not getting a perceptibly smooth and enjoyable experience so starting with our set of games for the HTC vive let's take a look at hollow point and you'll have to excuse the crappy footage quality of my monitor here but I didn't want a fraps or OBS screen cap recording to affect the performance results in hollow point we saw an average of 87 fps just shy of our 90 FPS goal while there were some dropped frames introduced there was too few of them for me to really notice any stuttering whatsoever coming from my core i5 PC sporting a gtx 980ti visually I could see no difference with our budget PC frame times were in good shape as well averaging 11 milliseconds with 99% of all frames staying within 22 milliseconds the our X 480 stays at a moderate 75 degrees Celsius on average with zero thermal throttling and also notice how we're only using 30 to 40% of our CPU and memory a trend we end up seeing with all the games tested on the live things go a bit haywire when we switch over to hover junkers though averaging 69 FP us with inconsistent frame times the data points are nowhere nearly as grouped together as we saw in Hollow Point indicating frequent instances of judder and framedrops that made the experience less than ideal job simulator brings us back to solid gaming with 85 FPS on average which again we're losing some frames here but not enough to perceptibly notice so this game was a super smooth run through in our headset similar results were had in space pirate trainer averaging 85 FPS and consistent frame times across the board this game was an absolute joy to play on our poor man's PC saving our most graphically demanding vive title for last the gallery called the starseeds scored just 60 FPS on average with frame time plot points that are divided worse than a bad boob job frame time variants constantly switched between 11 and 22 milliseconds plaguing the game with constant judder and making the overall experience quite unpleasant on a side note it's worth mentioning that the gallery utilized over five gigs of VRAM so there is a fair chance that the four gig rx4 ad will be constrained for memory buffer at some point when playing VR now with two out of the five games on the HTC vive performing less than adequate I was a bit nervous to try out the rift but I had also forgotten for a moment that the vive titles are still not quite as developed and often feel like unfinished products compared to what you might find in the oculus store so strapping into the rift I was delighted to see an average of 89 fps in the climb with solid frame timings whose occasional spikes went unnoticed to my eyes here we see our CPU and memory are being utilized significantly more than they ever were in the vive but not quite to the point where we should be concerned as we'll see in the rest of our rip titles the GPU load of the arts 480 also fluctuates considerably whereas we saw mostly a constant 100% usage with all of our HTC vive titles whether that's due to rift games using GPU resources more wisely or simply being less demanding is hard to say and will likely vary from game to game a Valkyrie was another title that showed great results 88 FPS on average and delivering a tightly grouped set of frame times that paved the way for an incredibly immersive and smooth experience the game scored horribly however in my motion sickness test again with Apollo 11 we see a strong average FPS and beautiful frame times with the 99th percentile scoring just twelve speedy milliseconds sounding like a broken record now Lucky's tale was a walk in the park yielding solid numbers all around while barely taxing the hardware of our VR beater rig finally an oculus dream deck we only signed 81 FPS average our lowest score on the rig we shouldn't hold those extreme frame time spikes against it though since that data is a result of the screen going black when switching between scenes and the demo still this was the only test on the rift where I experienced some occasional judder when moving my head quickly side to side and even then it was quite minimal compared to the few sluggish titles on its rival platform overall it appears that our humble PC here delivers a rich and fluid VR experience for the oculus rift but tends to be more hit or miss when it comes to the HTC vive I'll have to keep a close eye to see if that trend continues as more polished vive titles hit the steam store while this build might be a bit underpowered for someone looking into the vibe at the same time I'd almost expect someone on this tight of a budget to have their eyes set on the more affordable rift sure you'll have to pick up the oculus touch controller separately later this year but buying your VR set up a piece at a time might just be the way to go if you're strapped for cash now a final thought to consider when building around minimum spec requirements is that while they're good enough for today there's no guarantee they'll be well suited for the next wave of VR content it's kind of like buying pants that barely fit while the McDonald's dollar menu continues to grow more compelling with that in mind I would suggest waiting to see what NVIDIA has up their sleeve with the GTX 1060 but as of filming this video I remain impressed with the price to performance of the rx 480 and the VR experiences we've managed to achieve with this 550 dollar machine that's gonna do it for now guys so let me know what you think about this rig in the comments and don't forget to tell us me a look on this video if you enjoyed it before you go check the description below for my Amazon affiliate links and the best damn t-shirts on the interwebs as always I'm how thousands as a network thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I will see you all in the next you