What's a good laptop or desktop for the Index?

[Phart]

Ready to buy a new rig. What's a good laptop or desktop to use with Index? Any recommendations?

[celerun]

I think it's safe to say that you probably need to do a little more research beyond making a post on a steam forum. Especially one without any information that can help us guide you :)

What else do you need it for, what do you expect of FPS and in general overall performance? What's your budget? etc etc etc

[Phart]

Originally posted by celerun:

I think it's safe to say that you probably need to do a little more research beyond making a post on a steam forum. Especially one without any information that can help us guide you :)

What else do you need it for, what do you expect of FPS and in general overall performance? What's your budget? etc etc etc

Err, how is any of this relevant to the question what a good PC is for the Index?

I did google what's out there and the latest articles I'm finding are all from 2022 or older, hence posting here. Seems all the new PC (laptops in particular) don't have the Display port needed for the Index, maybe that's why?

Anyway, thanks for replying I guess.

[celerun]

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound arrogant or anything. It's just, your question is very wide.

When I first got my Index I had a 1080 TI on an 8700k and had great fun. But it wasn't until I upgraded to 13700k with a 4090 that I truly saw and felt the immersion of VR due to complete smoothness and nothing but gaming instead of tinkering for better performance.

Above you'll see the absolute minimum vs. the top of the line hardware you need in order to enjoy VR, and I think my poorly phrased previous question is to where on that scale do you see yourself and why? Once that's established, it's a bit easier to put something together for you that fits your budget and expectations. Otherwise the answer to your question would be to get the best of the best in order to avoid any headaches and performance loss. VR is quite heavy to run and the smoother your FPS are inside your headset the better the experience.

[Gracey Face]

You shouldn't buy an index to start with. The index was obsolete when it released (though just barely) and it's almost 5 years on from that point now. If you're dead set on buying from Valve for some reason then buy a quest 3 and wait (and pray) for the deckard.

But if you absolutely want to use an index for some inconceivable reason then you should be putting a desktop together (as it is cheaper than a comparable laptop and you will be tethered to a stationary spot by the index and the lighthouses anyway) anything GTX 1070 and up will get you good performance in VR on an index because of its low resolution. So prettymuch any modern graphics card.

You can get a 4060 for £2-300 in my country, yours will be different but probably not that much, and a 4060 will be overkill for an index. I would advise against going with AMD however as their VR support has historically been really bad and their frame generation system is not as good as Nvidia's. For the CPU you don't need anything better than an i3 for gaming because even now the vast majority of games do not even utilise multiple cores and those that do do not do it effectively, and an i3 only costs around ~100-150 in my country. But if you intend to do anything else then it'll be worth spending ~100 more on an i5 at least for the higher clocks and greater number of cores (which helps in productivity style use). Then it's another 150-200 for a basic 790 mobo and then it'll be another 250 for everything else (ie 50 for a 500-600w PSU, another 50 for a 500Gb M2 drive (I'd advise spending more, space is valuable).

Minus 100 if you want to use a cracked version of windows, but that's not something I have personal experience with (I don't know if it is even possible any more, I assume it is).


I don't much care about laptops so have no idea about them.

[temps]

I got the Valve Index back in 2020 approximately, and my RTX 3070 has run basically all VR games very nicely with that. The AMD equivalent card, which actually has slightly better performance (assuming no ray tracing or DLSS is used), is the AMD RX 6800.

Ryzen 5600X or newer CPU.