Upgrade or replace to be Oculus Ready?

Hi Guys,

I'm having a bit of an internal debate with myself, but I am out of touch enough on specifications/CPU tech these days to be unsure of myself!

I currently have an "Early 2008" Mac Pro, (with windows on it!) running dual 2.8hgz E5462 "Harpertown" Xeons, 8gb ram, and a GTX960. This setup has served me well and runs anything I chuck at it, including my rift DKII and Elite Dangerous (at medium settings).

The issue is that when the Rift Consumer Version is out in a few months, I know the 960 won't cope so it needs replacing.

I have two options:

1) Simply upgrade the graphics card, likely to a Pascal GPU in a few months
2) Replace the entire PC, either a self build or one of the bundle PCs when they are announced.

The Mac pro is fine from a motherboard/Ram/PSU perspective - so really it's a question of whether those dual Xeons are up to it. Is there much of a difference between running 2 of those and a single modern i7? Benchmarks suggest not (they get very similar numbers when compared), but any opinions would be appreciated! There would be a huge gulf in price between a new card (circa £500) and a new PC (circa £1200), otherwise I wouldn't hesitate.

I guess it depends on how well threaded the games you will run are.

8 cores at almost 3Ghz each is a fair amount of CPU grunt IF the software efficiently uses them.

With it being a Mac, my understanding is that you will need a GPU with a Mac BIOS on it. The Mac GPU BIOSes have historically been larger than their PC counterparts and have stopped many modders from flashing the Apple bios over the PC one.....and the same GPU for Mac costs noticably more then it's PC version.

Maybe it's time to offload that Mac while you can still get a few quid for it?

Thanks for the thoughts. Luckily you only need the Mac bios if you want to run OSX - which I don't :) I only got the machine as back in 2008, it was cheaper to buy a mac pro than to build an equivalent yourself..thats changed now that the price has shot up by roughly £1000 for the new shaped ones.

I have certainly considered selling it - I can get £300-£400 for it as it sits, which along with the supposed discount oculus will offer may be enough to justify the upgrade :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Spud1

Benchmarks suggest not (they get very similar numbers when compared), but any opinions would be appreciated!

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I have to say most of the benchmarks I've come across show the opposite. That Core 2 quad systems perform poorly in some games and that 8 cores don't tend to give much of a performance increase in a lot of games.

http://www.techspot.com/article/1039...red/page5.html
http://www.hardware.fr/focus/101/per...eux-loupe.html

My friend just built a new pc from scratch and then had a mini panic about which gfx card to get with VR headsets coming along.

To be honest, I wouldn't upgrade before VR is actually out and is becoming mainstream. Give it time for developers to produce content for the headsets and then upgrade once there is something you want is out.

At least that is my train of thought (though I upgraded 5 months ago from I7 950 + AMD 6990 to a 5820K + Nvidia 980ti). I'm happy to wait a few years at least before I worry about VR headsets.