Virtual Renaissance

Maximum airflow, minimum form factor

ZAK STOREY, EDITOR

LENGTH OF TIME: 2-4 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: HARD

THE CONCEPT

THERE’S NO QUESTION that we’ve long been big fans of the Phanteks Shift line-up of chassis. Over the last few years, it’s certainly featured in a number of our builds. It’s one of those cases that really sparks the imagination when considering the potential of a system. That eccentric monolithic design was perhaps the first case to reimagine what an ITX chassis could look like, and how it could function. It doesn’t look quite so distinctive nowadays, with the likes of the NZXT H1, Corsair One, and Xbox Series X all featuring a similar sort of look and feel, but there’s no denying that even today, the Shift still flaunts a certain amount of flair, even with the heavy competition it faces.

However, case designs like this do tend to suffer from one problem in particular: airflow. This is something Phanteks has addressed across the last two iterations of its Shift Air chassis, though—in fact, you can read more about that in our review this issue (pg. 82). With the announcement of the Shift 2 Air late last year, we knew we had to get one in for a build, and with our resident staffer Sam jumping into the world of the virtual this month (pg. 18), there was no better scenario in which to use it than an overkill VR rig. Building a small-form-factor PC for anyone looking to pop one in their living room or man-cave made a lot of sense.

When VR launched with the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in 2016, system requirements were, at least for the majority of PC gamers, quite trivial compared to some of the things we’d seen prior in the realm of dedicated desktop monitors. In fact, you could get away with an AMD Radeon RX 480 for pretty much everything VRrelated—a card that was yours for only $240 or so back in the day. Let’s see how things have changed….

SPECS SPOT

FIVE YEARS ON, the minimum spec hasn’t changed as dramatically as you might think. In fact, it remains almost the same. For the Vive Cosmos Elite, that means a Core i5-4590 or AMD FX 8350 processor (yep, that old), at least 4GB of RAM, and any form of GPU higher than a GTX 970 4GB or Radeon R9 290 4GB. For some perspective, those GPUs score on average around 8,000–9,000 in 3DMark: Fire Strike (1080p); compare that to a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT today (which should cost around $200-300 normally), which can score over three times that. But that’s not where the story ends; the games themselves have their own minimum specs. In the case of Half-Life: Alyx, that’s a Core i5-7500/Ryzen 5 1600, 12GB of DDR4, and a GTX 1060 or RX 580 with at least 6GB of VRAM. Of course, higher specs than that provide better performance, and less latency and lag.