It's funny how a few months can change things. When Oculus and HTC unveiled their VR headsets earlier this year, you needed quite a hefty system to run them. You'd need a R9 290, or a GTX 970, neither of which were small cards, nor cheap ones. While VR today, six months on, isn't exactly pennies, you can pick up a fully capable system for much cheaper and in much smaller packages.
Take Zotac's new Magnus ERX480 mini PC. This Zbox packs an RX 480 with 4GB of GDDR5, an Intel Core i5-6400T processor clocked at 2.2GHz, up to 32GB of DDR4 SODIMM memory, space for 2.5" inch SATA or M.2 storage drives, as well as an optional model with a 1TB hard drive too.
All in all, the whole system measures up at just 8 x 8 x 2.5 inches, making it a very compact little system. Enough for you to put in a backpack if you wanted to go pseudo-wireless with your VR headset for roomscale immersion.
Other features include full 802.11ac wireless support and Bluetooth 4.2.
You can order systems with barebones hardware - just the basics, including a graphics card, or you can go all the way up to a fully installed system with Windows pre-installed, it's entirely up to you.
Although we have no pricing data for these new RX 480 equipped systems yet, a comparable barebones system with a GTX 1060 under the hood costs $1,000, so it may be around that mark, with costs increasing the more hardware you add in.
