Alienware Aurora R6 upgrade plans for VR

[Birdseed007]

I have an Alienware R6 desktop equipped with:

Liquid cooled Intel I7 7700
850W Alienware power supply
16GB single stick 2400 DDR4 RAM
256GB M.2 PCIe X4 SSD used mostly for Windows/boot drive
2TB 7200RPM storage drive
NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) GTX 1080 with 8GB GDDR5X

I mostly play things like Assetto Corsa, Star Wars Squadrons, Elite Dangerous and FS2020 and dabble in DCS World. In short I'm really a simulations guy and am hopeless at first person shooters! I do have a dedicated cockpit setup. I'm also an old git (51) and an airline pilot in real life so have invested in some pretty high end flight control gear - Thrustmaster Cougar, Warthog and T500RS racing wheel all used in a home built Akers Barnes cockpit.

I'm also a huge fan of VR gaming and use an Oculus Rift CV1. The current spec runs the Oculus Rift really well but the extra resolution offered by the new HP Reverb and its absence of screen door effect really has my interest piqued, the issue is that I don't know that my existing rig will cope with all that extra resolution. I want to therefore improve the system so that when I do finally order the HP Reverb I won't be facing a stutter-fest!

I have today ordered 2x 16GB sticks of Hyper X Fury 2666mhz Ram (£88) which is the fastest memory my motherboard supports and can be overclocked apparently. It will also mean for the first time being able to run the memory in dual channel mode and from reading reviews and benchmarks this would seem to offer around a 30% boost in fps without even overclocking (20% for dual channel and 10% for speed uplift).

My next move is thinking about the graphics card (when I can find one in stock to buy!!) I'm pondering the RTX3070 (around £550) which in dual fan configs looks like it would fit in my case (under 10.75 inches required). Again from benchmarks this seems to offer around a 60% gain in FPS and performance over my GTX1080.

Combined these two upgrades alone should enable me to enjoy around 100% increase in performance for around £650 investment which seems good value. It seems to me that while there may be people here who say I should bin the system and build my own rig for best performance that will likely be much more expensive. I also like my Alienware, I've owned 3 of their machines - two laptops and one desktop and they have been the most reliable, nicest to use and best performing machines I have ever had. I have also had superb service from them when one of the laptops did develop a fault (and it was 6 years old by then!) It's now still going strong as a backup machine at 9 years old!!

I'm also considering a dual fan RTX3080 as the card would seem to offer a 100% gain over my GTX1080 but I am unsure if the card would be significantly bottlenecked by the rest of my system? That gets me 130% gain for £950

I'd welcome thoughts from those in the 'know' over my plans and so my key questions are:

1. Do you think my plan to upgrade graphics card and memory makes sense?
2. Is the RTX3070 the sweet spot in a sytem like mine or is the 3080 going to be worth the extra cash?
3. Do you think the system after upgrade will run the HP Reverb G2 well?

Grateful for any input,

Many thanks,

Birdseed007

 

[mickyflinn]

Upgrading the gpu makes sense as you can take that with you to another system. A large ssd would mean faster loading times for games.

Memory I would have ordered another single stick of the same memory and then you could have 32gb in dual chanel.

Cpu is still 4 core but as far as I'm aware good enough for HPReverb G2 wh8ch should run very well with you upgrades

 

[Birdseed007]

Thanks for that - good to have another opinion - in fact I did try to buy a second stick of the existing memory but it was a rip off at £70 for a single stick so I decided £88 for two sticks of faster overclockable memory made better sense!

Birdseed