This is still a thing. cool.
Merry Christmas, you filthy animals.

My stability started to nosedive, so I bit the bullet and got a new CPU and motherboard. Intel 13600k paired with MSI Pro z690-a DDR4 motherboard. No power issues! No crashes! And runs like a dream! https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/57068072

I slapped a cheap liquid cooler on it (ID-Cooling Frostflow x240) and it keeps it nice and cool! The only tweak I had to do was changing MSI's CPU Lite Load setting from 12 to 5 as MSI is giving the wrong voltages for 13th gen, making them too hot.

I'm pretty sure my original issue was just a faulty board (or CPU).

Yeah, it's a big humble event honestly. It's really insane how much people take for granted on a daily.

Meta has officially announced their newest headset, the Quest Pro. Perhaps you're here because you're curious about this new headset. It's a $1500 device that adds pancake lenses, face/eye tracking, and better screens with QLED and local dimming tech. Most of the upgrades, however, have gone into the passthrough feature. It's 4x the resolution of Quest 2's passthrough and adds color and depth. All of this is an attempt to add augmented reality to the device.

For VR gaming the general consensus is that this headset is a hard pass. The upgrades for VR are minimal. The screen resolution remains the same. There is better clarity via the pancake lenses, which offer a much larger sweet spot. The panels also provide mechanical ipd adjustment and better contrast. The headset is more comfortable due to the thinner optics.

The sides of the headset, however, are left open to help with AR. As a result there is extreme light leak. There are magnetic attachments that fix this on the sides, but you'll still get the light leak from the bottom. To fix this, you'll need to buy a $50 add on gasket, an insult after spending $1500. Even if you think the new features like face and eye tracking would improve your VR experience, they are locked to standalone only and don't work in PCVR. What about foveated rendering? Apparently a dead end since the processing to perform it costs about as much as you'd save by using it.

There's no direct PC connection still (and probably never will be). It does use wifi 6e, so theoretically you might get better Airlink from the device, though using a cable will still be a better experience.

Even if you are super excited about AR, first impressions say it's still not there yet. And even if you did find something compelling to do with the headset, it only has a 1-2 hour battery life if using all its features. This isn't even long enough to last half a work day of meetings or work sessions, which is the main purpose of the device.

The Quest 3 is rumored to be coming next year and should have a lot of the VR improvements that the Quest Pro has (pancake lenses and an even better chip) while cutting some of the useless new features (face tracking) to keep the price down. That device should be between $300-$500.

Wait for the Quest 3.