Right now, going all-in on PC virtual reality means going big: you need a big space for room-scale VR, a big, powerful gaming PC and a big wallet to buy it all with. ASUS wants to make one of those things smaller. Unfortunately, it's not the price. The new ASUS VivoPC X is a compact gaming desktop that's powerful enough for virtual reality, but still small enough to be moved in a pinch.
Weighing in at just under five pounds, the VivoPC X boasts a Intel Core i5 Kaby Lake processor, 8GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and an NVIDIA GTX 1060 GPU. That's more than enough power to meet the minimum requirements for PC VR, but not quite enough to push the current generation of virtual realities to their limit.
Still, for $799, the VivoPC X is a decently power gaming rig in about the form-factor of a game console. Not too shabby. Is VR not your thing? No worries -- with two HDMI ports and DisplayPort out (with support for NVIDIA GSync displays), the VivoPC X will make a decent all around desktop machine too.
ASUS' compact gaming rig should be available in March, but if you're looking for something with a bit more power, you may want to wait for the ROG GT51CH -- a full-sized gaming desktop with an Intel Core i7 CPU, up to 64GB of RAM and 3TB of storage and support for dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 or 1080 graphics configured in SLI. That rig won't be out until halfway through the year (and prices aren't announced yet), but if you want to push consumer VR to its limits, it's a much safer bet.
Gallery: ASUS VivoPC X | 4 Photos
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