Hey there Eagler!!! Good to see you brother. So ya I'm going to sit tight for a bit, buy my new gaming rig, and the oculous unless you have another option and I have a tremendous amount of respect for your expertise and experience. I'm thinking it may take me about six months to a year to get in the saddle and fire up again. I'm getting geared up to dump about 3k in equipment and a few months of offline and TA time to get good to go.
That said I'm excited about coming back. I really missed the brotherhood and the friendships I made here.
In 6 months and especially if it's a year out, everything will change, so other than encouraging you to go for a VR build, nothing else will be applicable by then.
I can offer two bits of advice you can take as you like.
1) Go with a 2nd generation Head Mounted Display where the inevitable bugs and shortcomings have been worked out and fixed, i.e. the HP Reverb G2 ver.1's power cable issue or the current Varjo Aero (without audio, mic., or controllers), to name 2 that came/come with significant shortcomings. My son has the HP
G2 ver. 2 and loves it at the current price point.
2) Look for Haptic hand trackers, i.e. the Valve Index today, WITH base stations aka lighthouses as an affordable part of the package. Built-in audio and mic. i.e. the Index and HP Reverb have very nice sound but even the original Oculus Rift was good enough to me. WiFi 6 is looking good for wireless VR without lag and hopefully it'll be offered and available by the time you're ready. I can't imagine a new PC build without WiFi 6 built-in, even for an ethernet connected PC, so you should be good. Of course, state of the art displays are mandatory, and will probably come with the "new pancake lenses".
Nothing today checks all those boxes, but maybe in 12 months or so a major manufacturer's upgrade just might.
No mater what GPU you choose, it probably won't be good enough for the following Generations of VR HMDs. Do your research and plan to keep your gaming HMD for at least a couple of years. Don't over spend on a GPU as you'll probably want to upgrade it as part of any new HMD purchase.
Keep in mind that among today's gaming HMDs, none of which check all the boxes, they're running from $300 USD for the Quest 2, $600 USD for an HP G2v2 and $1,000 USD for a Valve Index in the Steam store. None of them check all the boxes and this is before you look at customer support going forward and their warantee and no cost recalls!
For gaming, the sweet spot for value vs. dollars, cough, seems to be about $5-$600 USD.
