There Will Be An Alienware With Oculus Rift Bundle

STATES CHRONICLE – You can almost hear hardcore gamers sigh as news broke out that there will be an Alienware with Oculus Rift bundle made available at some point in the future. The news comes after the steep price of the VR headset was announced at CES 2016. It made gamers scratch their heads.

Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey announced that the highly-anticipated virtual reality headset will retail in March at $600. That was more expensive than anyone thought the futuristic system was going to be. While it’s expected to drop in price at some point in the future, it’s unlikely that it will happen this year. Or the next for that matter.

That opens up the door for Oculus to make partnerships and offer their product at a discounted price when bundled with a high performing desktop. Alienware is one of the first that would likely come to mind when listing high-end PCs. And the bundle is certainly coming.

Luckey and Alienware founder Frank Azor announced that they will be offering a bundle of Alienware X51 R3 gaming desktop (valued at $1,200) plus Oculus Rift (valued at $600) for $1,600. That amounts to a discounted price of $400, though the cut in price is reportedly for the virtual reality headset. Perhaps the cut in cost will help soothe the worries of some gamers. And, the bundle will also arrive with a high-end PC that will definitely be able to handle the complex graphics and requirements of Oculus Rift.

The system requirements have certainly been on the mind of gamers as far as the VR headset is concerned. The company has yet to release any details on what sort of machine will be needed to run the exquisite graphics and play in the immersive world. However, we do have a bit of information now regarding necessities.

According to Luckey and Azor, the “recommended” specs will be of a GeForce GTX 970 graphics card for a good VR performance. That’s no slouch of a hardware, but it’s also not the latest. Luckey also mentioned that developers will be working with the latest GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 980 ti, or their equivalent, but they won’t be strictly necessary for gamers.

The high demands are understandable, and Azor stated that the specs cannot be compared to that of a normal game. It takes far more to run a virtual reality experience. Any less and the user is likely to get motion sickness. That is why Alienware, known for mostly high-end PCs, seems like the best partner.

In the future, it’s expected that all their products will hold the capabilities of smoothly running VR. In fact, the Oculus Rift founder claimed that there might come a time when PCs will be specifically built to run with virtual reality headsets. The market is expected to expand within the next two decades.

For those who have already pre-ordered the Oculus Rift, they will receive a $200 coupon which will be put toward purchasing an Alienware PC. The system will arrive much sooner and ahead of the headset, which is set to officially launch in March of this year.

Image source: alienwarearena.com