It’s finally here! Over a year of waiting for my first VR headset, and it’s all been worth it.
Setup was easy for the most part. The unboxing smell was real – I would have loved to capture that and run it in the GC-MS at work and figure out what delicious “known to cause cancer in California” chemicals were in that foam. Not cool on Pimax for taking Pitool offline from their website, not sure how a less connected purchaser would even get started. I don’t have any basestations or wands, so I thought I could skip SteamVR setup. I was able to get into SteamVR home just fine, but all the games crashed with a big grey box in front of me. Took me a few tries and extra restarts to attempt room setup in PiTool – this is the one you do with no lighthouses (for future searchers).
Once I got that sorted (and straightened out my forward facing direction) I tried a few different games. Everything I tried ran amazingly well (because I have no sense of framerates I guess?) with zero tinkering besides toggling parallel projections on and off.
My specs:
i7 4790k, stock clocks
16 GB DDR3
PNY 1080 TI
Games I tried:
Elite: Dangerous (never played before but it was fun to zoom around the starting station)
IL2: Sturmovik (didn’t get to play far in this due to crying baby)
Bigscreen Beta (Movies were neat, but I’d prefer my TV for now)
Subnautica (Played this the most, stopped after ~1 hr due to nausea from using the gamepad to turn around)
I’m so excited to play more and figure out everything I can do while waiting (not so patiently) for the lighthouses and knuckles to arrive.
In terms of overall comfort, I have no complaints. I’m at a great advantage for the 5k+ – I need glasses and they fit snugly inside the headset. I can’t see clearly outside of the glasses anyways, so my entire vision is filled and clear 
. I did have to tinker around with the IPD until things became clearest, but besides that the headset stayed put and I didn’t feel any soreness in my neck from my ~4 hrs of testing.
Now I need to find the “WOW” experience I can show my wife!
Really not keen on buying an entire Vive just for controllers – not really in my budget.