I’ve reconnected the HTC Vive in my otherwise mostly empty office as the flooring hasn’t arrived yet. I’m realizing that the office is a bit small even with almost everything out of the way. I had been planning to put together a downstairs (basement) computer for use with the headset at some point. I’m not seriously considering accelerating the process to get a more usable setup for working with room scale VR.

I’m looking at Unity as well as more direct OpenGL/OpenVR at this point. I think that the OpenGL approach is likely more interesting in the long run as I’m not currently thinking of things that look particularly like classic video games. I do want to get some initial development traction quickly though and Unity seems to promise a faster on-ramp in C#. My C# may be a little rusty, but it will come up to speed fast enough (and it is a useful environment in any case).

I’m looking at using one of my existing, old 4U rack mount cases with a spare power supply I have lying around. I think the system is going to look like:

• Intel i6700K CPU (LGA1151)
• Gigabyte LGA1151 motherboard (haven’t picked one yet, but I’ve had pretty good luck with them brand)
• 16GB DDR4 memory as 2x8GB sticks
• 500 GByte SATA SSD. 500 GB because at 250 I run out of space too quickly and I don’t want to spend time cleaning junk off of the drive and SATA because I have SATA drive wedges that will get me out of trouble if I need to while M.2 may offer a bit better performance.
• NVidia 1070 video card.

I have considered an LGA2011-v3 CPU and board but for this system the extra cost doesn’t seem to be worth it.

I am tempted by the NVidia 1080 cards. More money but excellent performance and for unoptimized OpenGL code this might make an important difference. I may order parts without the video card and bring this up with an older, lower spec card that I have available until I can decide where to go for the final hardware.

I am rather impressed with the cost of parts these days. Aside from the video this looks like around $600.00 worth of parts for a very capable system.