You could almost hear the collective groans from consumers when Oculus first revealed the price of its Rift headset, and then again when HTC did the same for Vive. If you were struck by sticker shock, try being a developer—HP this week announced a new line of Nvidia VR-Ready Z Workstations starting out at $4,363.
Nvidia's pushing its VR-Ready initiative pretty hard. On the mobile side, there are laptop solutions like MSI's new WT72 mobile workstation priced between $5,499 and $6,899, and now HP is tackling the desktop angle.
These are potent workstations that developers can equip with up to a 22-core Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 CPU (or up to dual CPUs that generate less heat), up to 256GB of DDR4 memory or 1TB of LRDDR4, and up to two Nvidia Quadro M6000 24GB graphics cards in SLI.
HP tests each configuration with HTC's Vive, though the headset doesn't come standard with the new Z Workstations—it's an optional add-on. There goes another grand.
"We are embarking on a new frontier that will change how content producers and artists develop the most immersive, visually stimulating content available," said Jeff Wood, vice president, Worldwide Product Management, Workstations and Thin Clients, HP Inc. "HP Z desktop workstations with NVIDIA graphics are the ideal combination for this new content creation era."
HP's already taking orders for its VR-Ready Z Workstations, though if you're wanting a system with dual Quadro graphics cards, you'll have to wait until May.
