Up until now if you wanted to strap on your own virtual reality headset you’d have to navigate through the mess that is importing items into South Africa. That was until local online retailer Raru announced that the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets would be made available for special order.
This is the first time we’ve seen a retailer actually selling these headsets which have been available in other parts of the world since 2016.
The Oculus Rift will retail for R14 999 (ouch) and the HTC Vive will carry a much higher price tag of R19 999 (eina!) though the Vive controllers are included in the package.
Before you rush out to get your calculators trying to figure out how much extra Raru is charging you for the chance to strap a screen to your face, the retailer has told customers on Twitter why there is such a large disparity in pricing.
“We are getting these from a local supplier so we have to work with the prices we are being offered the product at I’m afraid,” said Raru on Twitter.
Raru has also said that orders will be dispatched in 10 – 15 working days.
What is unclear at time of writing is how after sales support and repairs will be handled. We have contacted Raru to find out more about this and we’ll be sure to update this story when we hear back from the store.
It’s also worth pointing out that you need a positively beastly PC to run either of these headsets properly. We’ve included a break-down of the recommended specifications that should accompany each headset.
Oculus Rift | HTC Vive | |
NVIDIA GPUs | NVIDIA GTX 1060 / NVIDIA GTX 970 | NVIDIA GTX 1060 |
AMD GPUs | AMD Radeon RX 480 / AMD Radeon R9 290 | AMD Radeon RX 480 |
CPU | Intel Core i5-4590 | Intel Core i5-4590 / AMD FX 8350 |
Memory | 8GB | 4GB |
Video Output | HDMI 1.3 | HDMI 1.4 or DisplayPort 1.2 |
USB | 3x USB 3.0 ports plus 1x USB 2.0 port | 1x USB 2.0 port |
OS | Windows 7 SP1 or higher | Windows 7 SP1 64 bit |