*sorry for the late quote.. just catching up on what I missed yesterday evening in the conversation*

You forgot to include the price of the OS. Adding that from Amazon adds another $102.80 (price relfects OEM Pro version). Now assuming you already have a PC and are upgrading which means you already have a monitor, mouse, keyboard the grand total for a machine would be $502.63. You currently cannot purchase a whole PC that is capable of playing all PC games that will perform better than the PS4 at $400, but for $500 you can get a box that outperofrms a console and does much more than any console ever can. 

You could use linux and remove the price of the OS but then you won't even get half of the newer games you can get for the PS4 and performance is in game on linux due to unoptimized drivers is around 20% less than with Windows.

I am primarily a PC gamer as of late and other than the omission of the OS I agree with your statement that exclusives aside the PC is a far better option for gaming than console.  Not to say that consoles are not worth it, they are if only for the exclusive content and the ability to play easily form your couch. 

The PC priced out will outperform the PS4 but will not be able to utiltize VR to the same level that the PS4VR. This is mianly because of optimizations not currently avaialble for PC that the PS4 already has along with interop tricks that the PC currently cannot do as well as the PS4 can. This gap is likely to change very quickly after VR is actually fully available for the PC though.

Raistline don't even bother. He put in a dual core pentium CPU.

It would make him puke hardcore before it would do anything else in VR.

People that rave about how cheap PC gaming is usually pirate the OS :-/ (at least from what I've personally seen), or use either the Academic or profession version of MSDN to snag a license.

Also note that the CPU he picked is straight up crap. You need at least an i5 for gaming, and you probably want 16GB of ram on a PC at this point. 8GB is definately acceptable, but you start to hit issues with multitasking and caching (similiar to a SSHD, commonly accessed files and apps are cached in ram so that they can load up faster). that causes slowness for the OS.

We've all seen the budget box gaming PC comparisons. Of course in the case of the PS4, the comparison is now a $350 gaming PC which means using a cardboard box for a case and reusing or cannibalizing components at that level.

However, for the purpose of VR, entertaining the notion that if a gaming PC has comparable specs to a PS4 it is VR capable is way off base. The GDC breakdown (for HTC and Oculus) for what type of entry level hardware is required for Vive or Rift is $950 and again, that would be the minimum requirement.

At a certain point, cutting performance down to reduce the budget ceases to be a valid argument.

The CPU would choke on almost any game thats not on minimal settings.... and he also forgets the OS -- which is legally required to be purchase for new devices.

France is soon getting a second patch. US is likely to follow shortly after.

I dont understand the debate here.

People are well aware that the Vive is the most advanced VR headset, hence the price.

But at the end of the day, the Vive, Oculus and PSVR are just displays. What really push them is the content being processed on their respective boxes.

If you pretend to take advantage of the Vive with a 400$ PC, you are being delusional.

The Vive will give you a proper experience with the recommended PC specs, not the minimum.

The PSVR will always be the most straight forward experience. Ps4 + PSVR, boom.

Slight disagreement on a couple points.

Gaming is perfectly fine with at least a quid core i3, there is little difference in gaming benchmarks between and i3 and comparable i5. But yes, the Pentium is not really meant for gaming, it does not have nearly enough onboard cache nor the overall processing power needed for high quality gaming.

For gaming you do not need anything more than 8GB of RAM, most games don't even come close to using that much. There are very few instances that any normal PC user will encounter that they will need more than 8GB of ram unless they use creative applications such anything in the  Adobe CS Suite, or high fidelity audio editing, or CAD software.

But for what it's worth, the impression from GDC appears to be that both Vive and Rift are in a much better place in terms of being market ready as well as providing the best VR experience than PSVR.

About the only thing PSVR appears to have is an inexpensive platform and a 40m + current user base to potentially build off of. That should guarantee develop support at least initially, but PSVR still has the potential to be a far more expensive version of PS Move, with the same level of success (to be forgotten in the annals of console gaming like Kinect 2).

Have to agree here. The i5 is what a game PC builder would use in something closer to an $800 and up build. Under that and the additional budget allocated to CPU would be better spent on more GPU.

The i3 is perfectly suitable for the $500 gaming PC, not that we're looking at an enviable set up.