Couple notes: added an addendum to my original
writeup for a full parts-list if I were building a backpack system from scratch. Total cost is about $1300 and is available now (well, if you use a GTX 970 vs an RX 480). That may make the DIY route more relevant as it seems that MSI is targeting Holidays 2016 w/ a price of $2-5K, and Zotac and HP don't have any release dates/pricing announced yet.
I also stumbled upon the
Mini-Box Y-PWR the other day, a cheap $20 controller board that should let you easily hot-swap batteries and included that on the parts list.
@Hahutzy - for a pure backpack system, the easiest thing to do would be to use something like the
H5 SF cooler, which I also put in the final parts-list. It's probably not ideal to be sloshing around w/ liquid cooling on your back, but you get a lot of flexibility w/ that radiator and a PCIe ribbon cable. Conceivably, you can have all the PC components in a compact hydration pack form factor and have batteries (maybe a 5400 or 8000 mAh pack on each strap) on the front to help balance the weight (10lbs on your back isn't terrible in any case, but you could get really sleek w/ something like that With something like
that Colorful motherboard, you could probably end up w/ something not too far from a
Subpac form factor).
@EdZ I agree that offloading the Constellation code to an ASIC/microcontroller and making the tracking cameras wireless seems like a no-brainer, but Oculus seems to be having issues just putting one step in front of the other so I'm not going to get my hopes up too much for them getting it figured out before CV2.
As far as wireless
protocols go, WiGig has everything covered w/ WDE/WSE already (bandwidth, latency, bidirectional interaction), but what's missing are good implementations. The challenges are difficult, to say the least (beam-forming for 60GHz, handling drop-outs and attenuation). Nitero have made
some bold claims and promise to be demoing at E3, so we'll see, but if not, others aren't too far behind (Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm and Dell all have stuff, not to mention more specialized companies like Amimon, VidOvation, etc). Everything Nitero is doing already exists, but no one's brought it all together into a single solution yet.
