I finally did it. I built a PC for VR. I went about as middle of the road as I could and stayed under 1200 dollars on this build with a lot of help from my friends. Shout out to my brother in law for hand holding me through this mine field because I have never built a PC before, you know being a mac boy for almost 2 decades and all so I had a lot to learn. With all that said here are the deets.
For the mobo (yeah that's a term I had to google) I went with a micro atx board because I wanted a smaller form factor so we landed on the MSI B660m Mortar with Wifi which came in at $160 dollars.
That LGA 1700 motherboard was also chosen because we went with the 12th gen intel i5-12400 Alder lake cpu that was just shy of 200 bucks and we decided to go with the integrated graphics option so I could at least set things up while I waited so freakin patiently on a GPU, more on that in a moment.
For ram we slotted in 16 gigabytes of Crucial ballistix ddr4 memory for 85 dollars and I saved a little on this geek squad refurbished terabyte of M.2 NVMe ssd which landed at $80 dollars
Looking for about 700 watts of Power led us to the corsair rm750x fully modular PSU which was $130 bucks and to house all this budget to mid range joy is the SAMA IM01 Black Steel Micro ATX Case, for 70 bills.
With a lot of research and some help from you all in the community poll I was stuck trying to decide if I should go with a RTX 3070 or a 3060ti. In the end I was persuaded by a discord bot notifying me of a deal under msrp that I could not pass up. Shout out to GPU drops for all the help and speaking of discord I’m putting one together for the community here so stay tuned for that.
So yes I ended up scoring a zotac twin edge 3060ti for 375 dollars. The 3060ti just hit a sweet spot for price and performance and at the time before this great GPU fall it felt like I hit the lottery when I clicked the link and saw it was still available on amazon. For me and my link connected quest it has been working great especially in boneworks and half lyfe alex, which if I’m honest that's mainly why I built this thing and all the crazy vr mods out there for PCVR.
All in all my PC build took one thousand and 90 dollars from my account But I’m sure as you may have noticed I needed an upgrade sadly due to the stock cooler that came with my CPU kind of sucking and with its plastic push through pins it just would not secure to the mobo properly. This naturally caused my cpu to overheat and crash games before even getting to the start screen.
I decided to go a little bougie and bought the noctua NH-U9S cooler and fan for $60 pushing my final total to 1150 or in real monies after tax 12 hundred and 55 smackers.
So go ahead and roast my build in the comments and share your specs so next time I can do better. I really enjoyed this process and I’m just glad I’m now able to play steam vr games without bootcamp on my macbook pro (because well it was terrible). I went ahead and linked all the parts below and again shout out to my PC boys Joseph, Taylor and Canaan for answering a thousand texts of my confusion. Thanks again for watching and I’ll catch you in the next quickie!
The Build:
CASE: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811197012?Item=N82E16811197012
MOBO: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813144522?Item=N82E16813144522
COOLER: https://amzn.to/3tvLlkU
MONITOR: https://amzn.to/3Qjtuax