An Oculus Rift SFF Build

[The_Oasis]

Before I start demanding you guys to do all the heavy lifting, thanks for even considering looking at this thread and helping me out with a dream build of mine! I’ve got into the whole SFF aesthetic really recently, and I’m excited to have such a small but powerful build.

Let’s get started!

What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming, Photoshop (or other intensive programs), Web browsing, strictly HTPC/Playback, etc: My primary concern with this build is being able to run games with the Oculus Rift CV1, when that comes out Q1 2016, maintaining a minimum of 1440@90Hz. I will not be doing much else apart from that.

2. Will you be overclocking? (If so, are you looking to watercool?): While it would be nice to have the option open to me, I won’t go out of my way to do it. If a K processor is not too far in cost from none, then I’ll go for that.

3. What's your budget?: $1400 is the soft limit, the sweet spot. I can go up to $1600 though, if there are substantial gains to be made.

4. Where do you live?: I’m within driving distance of the Chicagoland Microcentre.

5. What exact parts do you need for that budget?: I will need a CPU, mobo, GPU, PSU, a Case (I’ve settled on the NCase to buy), and a HSF (if necessary)

6. If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing?: I already have a Samsung 840 EVO SSD, and a WD Black 2TB HDD. I also have 16GB of 1600MHz RAM (I think G.Skill Ripjaws?).

7. What specific features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Thunderbolt? Crossfire or SLI support? How many USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s? Etc: Integrated WiFi would be nice, but not if there’s a better board available (I can always use some USB adapter). USB 3.0 headers for the NCase’s front panel.

8. What resolution output do you need?: As I said, the Oculus Rift CV1 will be running at 1440@90Hz, so I’ll need to be able to push that.

9. Does this system need to fit into a particular space and do you need an optical drive?: Nope!

10. How comfortable are you with custom case design/modification and electrical wiring?: Haven’t done anything like it yet, but I’d be up for learning!

11. How important is the noise/silence of this sytem?: I don’t really care. If you can manage it within the budget, though, go for it!

12. How mobile does this system need to be?: Not really that important, if I am moving it it will probably be in a Pelikan hardcase.

13. Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?: I hear Windows 10 is free with the Insider Version. If that doesn’t work, then no. 64 bit for sure.

14. When do you plan on building/buying the PC?: Either in a month or two, when the whole Fury line comes out, or when Skylake comes out, since I hear that’s going to be good for SFF builds. If it is when Skylake comes out, it’s entirely possibly my budget may go up by a few hundred dollars, too, so OC might be more of a possibility.

And that’s it! Thanks again in advance!

Cheers,

Oasis

 

[Black5Lion]

I recommend you wait a bit for Skylake to come out. Most boards have 2 USB 3.1 ports and a bunch of 3.0 ports + internal 3.0 port headers. Not to mention m.2/u.2 and sata express(good for future-proof-ness).
One drawback with Skylake though is that it's DDR4 so you won't be able to use the ram you have now IIRC.

 

[EdZ]

If you don't have any pressing time concerns, definitely wait for Skylake. If nothing else, it'll push Haswell CPU and board prices down a bit as distributors clear stock.

While it's unlikely any new GPU architectures will be released before CV1 arrives, it may be worth waiting until later in the year simply because existing cards will drop in price. the Fury line may or may not push down GTX 970/980/980ti prices depending on how well they perform in practice, but prices will still drop over time anyway.
Alternatively, you could pick up a 970 or R9 290 now and hit Oculus' minimum recommended specifications, and make a choice of whether or not to upgrade nearer/after CV1 is released.

 

[The_Oasis]

I recommend you wait a bit for Skylake to come out. Most boards have 2 USB 3.1 ports and a bunch of 3.0 ports + internal 3.0 port headers. Not to mention m.2/u.2 and sata express(good for future-proof-ness).
One drawback with Skylake though is that it's DDR4 so you won't be able to use the ram you have now IIRC.

Thanks Blacklion! I'll definitely consider it, and I'm sure I can sell off the RAM I have now to trade up to DDR4.

If you don't have any pressing time concerns, definitely wait for Skylake. If nothing else, it'll push Haswell CPU and board prices down a bit as distributors clear stock.

While it's unlikely any new GPU architectures will be released before CV1 arrives, it may be worth waiting until later in the year simply because existing cards will drop in price. the Fury line may or may not push down GTX 970/980/980ti prices depending on how well they perform in practice, but prices will still drop over time anyway.
Alternatively, you could pick up a 970 or R9 290 now and hit Oculus' minimum recommended specifications, and make a choice of whether or not to upgrade nearer/after CV1 is released.

Thanks, EdZ! My other plan, if I were to build now, is sell everything in my current build except the GPU (7950) and just run with that in the NCase until the time when I need to upgrade.

I think though, with your recommendations, I'll wait around for Skylake. I'm a fan of new shiny things, so I'll enjoy working with it.

Thanks again for your help!

 

[goodbyegalaxy]

Skylake's memory controller supports both DDR3 and DDR4 btw. It'll be up to the motherboard manufactures to decide which DIMMs to support.

 

[The_Oasis]

Skylake's memory controller supports both DDR3 and DDR4 btw. It'll be up to the motherboard manufactures to decide which DIMMs to support.

Oh, that's great! In which case, I can probably stick around with my RAM for now. Good to know, since I was thinking selling the RAM would be a pain.

 

[Aibohphobia]

The DDR3 support is only for DDR3L, the low-voltage stuff (1.2V - 1.35V).

 

[inchikiboze]

The concern, of course, is getting enough GPU horsepower to drive the two 1080 x 1200 displays (one per eye) at a steady 90 fps out of one card and within your budget. Remember that a single 970 is only the minimum recommended GPU setup, which probably means the experience won't be all that great.

Sure, you could splash out on a 980 or even 980 ti / Fury X now and probably still squeeze everything within a $1600 budget, but doing so sounds a bit reckless, given that the hardware isn't even out yet. I would take EdZ's solid advice and wait for Skylake and end-of-the-year deals. If you take advantage of the crazy sales and Micro Center, I would think that you should be able to put together a nice Haswell or Skylake system with a 970 or a similar card for $1200, maybe even cheaper. That will get your foot in the door when the CV1 launches. Then, when Pascal rolls around and we have a much better idea about what kind of power actual Oculus gaming will require, use the savings from your build plus whatever you can get for selling your 970 to get a new card in the $300-500 range. Then, you should be sitting pretty. To sum up the strategy: build a system and cheap out a bit on the graphics card soon, then upgrade the card next year with the savings.

 

[wahaha360]

If you are interested in Pelican hard cases.

Image Gallery https://imgur.com/a/X0GJe

 

[EdZ]

The concern, of course, is getting enough GPU horsepower to drive the two 1080 x 1200 displays (one per eye) at a steady 90 fps out of one card and within your budget. Remember that a single 970 is only the minimum recommended GPU setup, which probably means the experience won't be all that great.

That's not the case. The purpose of Oculus providing the minimum requirement is for developers to have a set minimum performance level to target for a good experience. i.e. if you have that minimum spec or better, then any game released for CV1 (and with Oculus stamp of approval) will run at a 100% acceptable level (acceptable frame render times, minimal render time variance, etc). Developers can develop for targets lower than that, but if you develop a game that requires a 980 or higher to run acceptably then Oculus likely won't provide the approval to use their trademarks (i.e. you can't sell it as 'compatible with CV1').
YMMV if you're fiddling with pre-release software, but that's the case no matter what the performance.

 

[inchikiboze]

I think we're on the same page here, just coming at it from different angles. A single 970 will be fine, 100% acceptable--you won't run into the danger of not being able to run games on the CV1. I didn't mean to imply that a 980 or higher will be absolutely required to get the thing to work. My apologies if the comment came off that way.

But, to me at least, "acceptable" is often synonymous with "[not] all that great" in the PC gaming space. If you can get more for your money, why not go for it? That's my personal opinion, anyway. Again, we still don't know how this whole thing will work, but one thing I can be pretty confident about is that all else being equal, a person with a 980 or higher will have a better experience than someone with a (perfectly acceptable) 970. That's all I'm saying. Just trying to help Oasis get the most for his money.

If you're satisfied with a single 970 and it runs everything well, terrific. More power to you, and you can pocket the savings and do something else. Luckily, the strategy I suggested has that option built in. You could start with a 970 and feel the performance out. If you're satisfied, great, no need to upgrade.

 

[EdZ]

But, to me at least, "acceptable" is often synonymous with "[not] all that great" in the PC gaming space.

For VR, this is not the case. There is are some hard lower limits below which performance is no longer acceptable, and above which increasing performance has diminishing returns; rendering 'faster' does not provuide any immediate performance benefits. It adds performance headroom that could be used for additional effects, but only when those additional effects can be done within that performance delta or less.
Or put another way, there is not a scale from:
awful -> not that great -> OK -> good -> better
for properly optimised VR. It's closer to:
completely awful -> acceptable -> unused performance headroom

but one thing I can be pretty confident about is that all else being equal, a person with a 980 or higher will have a better experience than someone with a (perfectly acceptable) 970

That again may not be the case at all. The easiest and most reliable way to optimise a game for VR would be to optimise it for Oculus' minimum specs, then lock out all modification to tunable settings. Because at that point changing the settings would either drop visual detail for no benefit (because you are already optimised for acceptable performance at that spec), or would push performance below the acceptable threshold. Because of the number of effects that need to be considered (anything from render times pushing over the late-latching threshold, to mipmap resolution and layout causing issues with edge colour mismatch between eyes) there is no easy metric for consumers to use to tune things themselves: "setting X give me a higher framerate than setting Y" is not something you can do for VR.

For a VR headset, there is one correct refresh rate, and one correct output resolution (though some leeway in pre-eyebuffer resolution, depending on the compositor). There are hard minimums on performance. It is distinctly unlike PC gaming where you can tune various parameters to personal taste.

For any gaming other than VR 'more power always = better' holds true. For testing in-development VR games, 'more power always = better' holds true. But for running optimised games released as a final product, more power may not provide any benefit at all.

 

[inchikiboze]

...for running optimised games released as a final product, more power may not provide any benefit at all.

Interesting! I did not know that. Well, you can definitely keep this in mind when putting your build together, Oasis. I must admit that I'm still a bit skeptical that a more powerful setup won't provide a meaningfully better experience with VR (in addition to the other benefits), but I'd love for my skepticism to be proven unwarranted, and EdZ obviously has more knowledge than I do in this area. Can't wait to see how it works out. Good luck, and let us know what you decide to do with your build!

 

[The_Oasis]

Wow! I come back some weeks later and find you guys have this all planned out. Awesome!

@wahaha360, I had actually PM'd /u/veystass about the Pelikan case, and he told me that it worked pretty well, though a case one size up (forget the model number) might've been better.

@EdZ: Hot damn do you know your stuff. I understand how optimization works, but isn't the 970 merely a cut down version of the bigger number cards? AKA if you optimize for the 970, then the 980 can do all that and throw in a bit extra too?

If all that is actually correct, then I may as well buy a 970 right now for my current system, and then bump on up to Skylake/ITX when the time comes around. My DK2 would sure appreciate the new card for what I throw at it in E. What do you think of that? Or should I still wait?

@inchikiboze: Well, I'm certainly not only going to play in VR (however much I want to). An ITX build offers a perfect opportunity for me to get MAME and other virtual consoles working on another HDD or something. And there'll still be some people not developing for the CV1 from the get go, thus the powerful card might come in handy. In which case, I might skip over the 970, and go for as high as I can right now, and still replace everything else come Skylake (though I'm worried how much the value of my PC will depreciate if I do wait up until then. Maybe sell in Nov.?)

In the end, I'm really, really excited to build this. I want to build something really amazing, the ideal battlestation. I can't wait to do so! Thanks for the help, guys.

 

[EdZ]

AKA if you optimize for the 970, then the 980 can do all that and throw in a bit extra too?

It's that 'throw in a bit extra' which is the tricky part. Because of the hard performance threshold, it's not easy to leave settings open to variation while still guaranteeing that minimum performance. You can think of it as four scenarios:
1) Optimise performance for the minimum baseline configuration, offer no performance scaling whatsoever. You get no benefit from a faster rig, but you KNOW that your game will always hit that minimum threshold.
2) Optimise performance for the minimum baseline configuration, and use 'safe' render target buffer scaling for cards above that. You 'use up' any extra performance those cards can provide, but the actual visual benefit is minimal at best
3) Optimise performance for the minimum baseline configuration, and perform a new optimisation for every card that is above that baseline. Massive amount of work, but you know every configuration will hit the minimum performance threshold.
4) Optimise performance for the minimum baseline configuration, but leave all the settings unlocked in an 'expert' menu. You are pretty much guaranteed that anyone messing with them will only push performance below the minimum threshold, and complaints of you game's 'poor experience' will skyrocket (because gamers are so used to being able to tweak things to their own preferences).

Scenario 1 is the one that requires minimum effort from developers, and results in a consistent experience for everyone. 2 may occur depending on time and budget constraints, and how easy engines make it to implement automatically (there is talk of using dynamic render target scaling as standard, which would make it a lot easier). 3 is probably out of the picture unless GPU manufacturers sponsor it, due to the extra effort required for minimal payoff.

This only applies to CV1. For DK2, very little optimisation is occurring (because it's a devkit) so you need all the performance you can get.

 

[The_Oasis]

Thank you very much, EdZ! So I guess then I'll look around for a good blower-style 970 to buy (which would you recommend?) and then I'll twiddle my thumbs until Skylake comes out!

Oooh I'm so excited.

 

[EdZ]

I guess then I'll look around for a good blower-style 970 to buy (which would you recommend?)

For the 970, the only blower-style cooler worth bothering with is the NVTTM-like 980 cooler.

Nvidia did not produce a reference design for the 970. The majority of OEMs took the 970 chip, and placed it onto existing 760/670 PCBs, and re-used their 760/670 coolers. This meant the coolers were working a bit harder, and ran faster (and noisier).
Manli, and possibly one other unnamed OEM, took the 970 chip and placed it on a 980 PCB, using the 980 cooler (with a custom '970' etched shroud).

If you're in the UK, OCUK carry this 'reference' 970 (OCUK branded). In the US, I believe Best Buy carry them (unbranded).