Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus, recently discussed just how much you can expect to spend on a “complete package” of a computer powerful enough to use the VR headset, and the headset itself. He estimated the price of everything at around $1500, which is definitely not something just anyone will be able to afford.
The company hasn’t announced pricing for the headset just yet, but since Oculus has already announced what they consider minimum specs to power the headset, we can try to ballpark what price point they’re trying to hit.
The recommended hardware for the Rift demands an NVIDIA GTX 970/AMD R290 GPU or greater, an Intel Core i5-4590 CPU or better, and 8+ GB of RAM.
Quickly searching around on Amazon, you can find those GPUs in the $300 – $350 range, while the CPU runs around $180 and 8 GB of RAM will cost about $60. You can estimate those parts to cost between $550 and $600, and that’s not including a computer case, motherboard, hard drive, or power supply.
Going with cheaper components, you could finish that computer build for roughly another $300 (assuming you were willing to piece things together by yourself and not buy a computer from a company) and end up hitting upwards of $800 – $900. A pre-built machine will likely add several hundred extra dollars to that price tag. A machine that hits the recommended hardware from iBuyPower lists at around $1100.
With those price ranges, we can assume the Rift will be priced anywhere from $300 to $700. Granted, that’s a pretty wide range to try to figure out, but I’d bet that Iribe is counting on most people buying their computers, not building them, so hopefully that price is a little closer to the low end.
source: re/code
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