Oculus Rift has been on the headlines just recently and they owe it to the much-awaited price announcement; however, it is said that HTC Vive will give Rift VR a tough competition on Virtual Reality department this year. (Photo : YouTube/Thio Joe Tech)
Virtual reality rigs are quite expensive but the new HP Envy desktop package now comes with an HTC Vive VR headset for just $1499 making it one of the cheapest options out in the market.
HP and HTC have teamed up to bring VR gaming for their customers in a more affordable way than having to buy both a rig and the headset separately. The HTC Vive alone costs around $800 and a PC gaming rig that would be able to support VR can cost up to $1000.
One of the reasons why the VR audience is quite small is the expensive cost. Besides the equipment, the user must also ensure that they have ample space in their room for the tracking technology.
The HTC Vive is now included with the new HP Envy 750-415VHR package that is powered by a single AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card, The Verge has learned. It also has 8GB RAM which is more than enough for everyday tasks on a computer even with VR gaming.
For the storage, the HP Envy with HTC Vive has a 128GB SSD and 1TB HDD for storing games and other multimedia files that takes up space. In addition, it will also come with a USB keyboard and an optical mouse.
Powering the HP Envy is an Intel Core i5-6400 processor to ensure a bottleneck-free VR gaming experience with the HTC Vive VR headset, Pocket-Lint reported. The device will also support four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports for those peripherals and flash drives.
HP is also giving it an Ultra-Slim-Tray SuperMulti DVD burner but the Envy package does lack a monitor. Interested customers will need to dish a couple more dollars for a new monitor or just use the one that they already have at home considering that they would be mostly using the HTC Vive for the VR gaming experience.
HTC and HP will be selling the HP Envy VR rig package with the HTC Vive around the holiday season. The $1499 price tag does not include the shipping costs for those who want to order it online.
