AlteredRealitiesVRArcade

It gets better.. so, I plugged my WiGig card into an ASRock H270M Pro4 board, and no matter where I put that card, the NVidia graphics card slot remained at x16. I had it in Slot 1, and the WiGig in Slot 4 as per https://www.asrock.com/MB/Intel/H270M%20Pro4/index.asp#Specification and set it to PCIE 3.0 in the UEFI. Either GPU-Z isn't correctly reading the slot speed, which should have dropped to x8, or the UEFI is smart enough to recognize the Intel WiGig card as not being a graphics card, and routes it as PCM traffic instead. So add another variable to the list - motherboard provider or version. Gorrammit. Either way, the WiGig card isn't going to perform any better on my systems no matter what slot I put it in.

What Intel CPUs currently offer more than 16 PCI-E (graphics) lanes? The confusing part for us here is that there's PCI-E lanes dedicated to graphics, of which the CPUs have 16 that can be split into x8/x8, x16, x4/x8, etc. Then there's PCI lanes (PCM?) that are MOTHERBOARD CHIPSET-owned and while they use the same slots as the PCI-E graphics lanes, they don't have the same direct connection (priority) to the CPU and appear to be limited to an aggregate of 4Gbps. So, if you're running the WiGig card off a PCM lane and have NVMe drives and LAN that's pushing large amounts of data around, you could encounter a bottleneck at times. Why are WE having to do this homework and not Intel and HTC?

Because the "K" chips are unlocked for overclocking purposes. Integrated graphics are good for use in OBS streaming - after a quick UEFI tweak, you can use QuickSync and not take anything away from your discrete GPU when recording.

Feel free to shoot full of holes as I'm using observational references at this time. I have an i7-7700K with 32GB RAM and have intermittent grey-outs while playing. I've been able to mitigate these by turning off my antivirus and firewall (both Microsoft Windows 10 default products). When I DO have grey outs the issue appears as a disconnect in SteamVR, not an issue with the general OS function or GPU function. My pet theory is the Intel WiGig pushes the CPU so hard any break in the timing, like the AV updating or scanning (priority issue?) will cause SteamVR to read that as an interruption of connection to the headset and disconnect temporarily. I really really wish Intel had made this thing work through a discrete GPU or at least allow us to offload the process to the built-in GPU on the CPU. It's probably made worse by recent OS 'fixes' and new Intel microcode that mitigate the Spectre vulnerabilities discovered last year. Those fixes trash some performance use cases on Intel processors, and won't be re-worked into a less performance-trashy form in Windows 10 until March (or whenever it ended up getting pushed out till). I'm going to try the wireless out on an i7-8700K next week and see if there's better performance for me.