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New Participant
January 27, 2015

Oculus DK2 - Portable Solution - Alienware? - Minimum Spec

Hi,

I'm looking at moving away from a desktop for development to something more portable (ease of mobile demonstration).
Looking at Alienware 17, the spec looks something like this:
- Intel® Core™ i7-4980HQ Processor (Quad-Core, 6MB Cache, up to 4.0GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
- Windows® 8.1 (64-bit), English
- NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 980M with 4GB GDDR5
- 16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
- 128GB M.2 SSD (Boot) + 1TB 5400RPM (Storage)

High ticket investment so I would like to here some opinions and understand whether or not DK2 would work well on this.

Thoughts/comments welcome.

Many thanks.

    5 replies

    Up and Coming
    January 27, 2015
    Not sure of the pricing on that but I personally believe the MSI GT dominator series offers more bang for the buck.

    http://gaming.msi.com/products/notebook/gt-series#hero-model

    You can compare as needed; I have always noted Alienware was more expensive...
    Inspiring
    January 27, 2015
    Whatever you do, make sure it DOES NOT have Nvidia Optimus or you will be sorry. Optimus has horrible Oculus support and many times it won't work at all. In general, I would recommend against buying a laptop for VR use, but I understand that are reasons to go that route. Might be better off with a portable LAN-party type PC build over a laptop.
    AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV
    New Participant
    January 30, 2015
    Hi cyberreality, appreciate what you are doing trying to steer people away from laptops to avoid disappointment. But the "which laptop should I buy" question isn't going to go away & isn't an unreasonable question to ask a manufacturer.
    I'm not saying that oculus should produce some kind of definitive list - but naming one, two or three high end gaming laptops which are KNOWN to work well in direct mode would be incredibly helpful.
    I'm currently leaning towards getting an Alienware 13 i7 & the graphics amplifier under the assumption that this can bypass the Optimus mess for "quality" testing when in the office, but leave me free to dev on a riverbank somewhere in my VW camper when the mood takes me.
    It would be SOOOOOOO! Helpful if I actually knew that it worked... HELL, tell me a chillblast helix does the job and I'll swing that way... Just throw us a bone pwleeease!
    Up and Coming
    January 31, 2015
    We were in the exact same situation and we opted for an Asus ROG G751JT (http://www.ncix.com/detail/asus-rog-g751jt-intel-core-54-102955-1120.htm). We are using it for demo purposes along with internal development.

    The G751JT/JY has a GTX 970m with no Optimus. Do not get an Asus with G751JM - it has Optimus.
    http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?53828-%26%23914%3Big-Dilemma-Asus-g750JZ-or-Asus-g751JT/page4

    I recently posted some details on how we got our demo setup working. From our early tests, direct mode works with Unity Tuscany / Desk and our internal OpenGL based native application - however we have not tested it on any other demos. Extended mode mirroring with landscape flipping is a mess as usual however, with the Windows registry trick to enlarge the taskbar preview of an application, it's easy to run in extended mode non-mirroring for demo purposes.
    viewtopic.php?f=20&t=19794

    A few things about Asus ROG laptops that we learned after purchasing. It does not come with a recovery disk / Win 8.1 disks. Apparently Win 8.1 license is tied to the Bios, and it is recommended to make an image (to a USB stick) for recovery purposes. At some point it would be great to have it triple boot Win7, Win8, Linux for compatibility tests.

    In general it worked right out of the box - with the usual bugs that are out of the community's hands (NVidia double vision, Direct mode based juddering).

    Hope this helps!
    Up and Coming
    February 5, 2015
    Maybe something like my Mini ITX build is something for you.

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