Run away! Save your wallets! It’s too late for me, but save yourself!
Helping provide some hardware suggestions for a new VR PC build for a project, and put together some numbers looking at what it would take to get into this:
The project involves wiring up an aircraft cockpit to use as a simulator, and then possibly also putting together an Authentikit-based spitfire simulator, but I was a little shocked by how quickly the costs could add up if one bought all this stuff at once. And this isn’t even touching buying all the controls from companies like Virpil or Winwing. I hope my wife never looks at my sim and does the math…
It makes riding motorcycles or flying RC airplanes look downright reasonable!
Interesting that you mention cycling, because i find that relatively cheap. I spend more money on climbing shoes repairs and bouldering gym entry fees in 2 months than what cycling costs me the entire year.
The entry can be steep, but you can get mighty fine used road bikes for 1k that should last for decades if treated right.
Running costs are relatively low that’s true, but I just ordered a new commuter bike for ~5200€ and I am planning to get an Aeroad CF SLX in the near future as well. I spend about ~600-1500€ for parts and maintenance per year. That’s less than 10€ per kilometer.
True, unfortunately a fairly mild crash last winter has ruined my frame, hence the new commuter. By now I’ve put well over 84000km on it over the course of 6 years but it’s only a matter of time before the frame around the bottom bracket kicks the bucket…
She bikes to work every day - has done for some 20+ years - and she’s now 60 and it gets very windy round here. I keep trying to persuade her to get a battery powered one, but she won’t have it.
PS - she’s also gone through at least 6 bikes in that time - including mine - as she rarely bothers with maintenance.
Ha - that’d be the day! It’s about 5 miles. Mind you like I said, it’s more often than not very windy here - so rather her than me!
When I wasn’t so debilitated we used to do a bit of cross-country on our MTBs. I bought us a pair of Raleighs (expensive and quality back then). Hers lasted a few years - mine lasted 22 years!
That base price of over $3k for the PC seems a bit much to me unless no attempts to save were made!
The only things I ever spend more than about $250 on are the GPU and CPU. Mobo, RAM, drive, and case shouldn’t total more than $1k by themselves. Throw in a $500 GPU and a CPU at about $350 and you’re well short of $2k.
Assuming you go with a completely new build and you want VR with some bells and whistles you are going to have to spend more than that. The 7800XT for example is at the lower end of what I would go with for a VR build these days and that’s ~550-600€ in Germany right now, however personally, I would rather go with something like a 4080 or 7900XT which puts you over 1000€ alone, R7 7800X3D ~400€, 64GB DDR5-6000 with decent timings ~250€, mainboard ~250-300€, 4TB NVMe ~300€ and you’re already well over 2000€ without a case and PSU.
I might even go with 128GB RAM these days, LR and Photoshop eat RAM for breakfast
Without saving I would get a 4090 for that lovely VRAM and a 670E with as many NVMe slots as possible.
64GB is worth it of you play DCS in VR, I wouldn’t go lower with a new build. 32GB is fine for singleplayer but if you play multiplayer lots of fast RAM is very helpful. I am speaking from experience here, quite a few cases in my squadron where the jump from 32GB to 64GB made all the problems go away.
2TB is just not enough for what I use my PC but it’s okay if all you do is simming, although with all the new maps that are in the works you might want a separate 2TB for DCS only .
I have 2x2TB NVMe atm and 4x4TB SATA SSDs plus 16TB on my NAS (32TB total)
Unfortunately to drive a modern VR headset at acceptable levels (no stuttering, no shimmering) I’m afraid to recommend less than a 4090 in today’s world. I know my previous 3080 wasn’t up to snuff, but don’t have any experience with anything in between those two cards.
The goal is to use this as an uncertified FTD for supplemental training, and the spitfire sim for education/fun. I don’t want it to underwhelm or be disappointing in terms of how it runs DCS.
My 3080TI handles DCS quite well although it could do with more VRAM for VR. 12GB can get dicy in large MP missions, the 4090 is of course the card to get if money is no factor. It really is a shame that there is such a huge gap between the 4090 and 4080. Maybe the rumoured 4080TI can fill that gap but who knows…
But yeah, a “budget” VR build would be 7800X3D, B650 board, 64GB DDR5-6000, 4080, 4TB NVMe or 2x2TB NVMe. Still quite expensive. The unfortunate truth is that you can’t really build a PC for VR on a real budget.
Now if you play on a monitor you can get away with a much cheaper build but for VR you have the option to spend money or suffer through terrible performance and visuals.
Appreciate the sarcasm, but honestly as someone that did non-VR flight simming before I consider it wrong, Going into VR is NOT that much extra costs spent on VR itself. I fly with quest2, thinkin about quest3 next, as this thing has absolutelly perfect reprojection algorithms inside that I play DCS at 36FPS to get smooth 72FPS VR with no artefacts. My HOTAS was more expensive that quest2. And I owned Reverb G2 for a week before returning it as that headset was simply terrible and I do not get it why sim community is hyping it (terrible sweetspot, terrible reprojection algorithm that you have to do full 72/90fps from PC, overheats and gets foggy with no active cooling)
PS: I actually managed to get one friend hooked to ww2 planes simming as entry level quest2 + T1600 joystick can actually get you quite a bang for the buck these days. And everybody owns a gaming PC, just play iL2 or warthunder before loosing faight in humanity trying to get DCS to perform properly.
it just leads to shock and possible expensive presents for the wife/partner if they find out 
