First things first, packaging and the unboxing: happy to report everything is up to par on this front. My first and only other headset being an original Vive, the packaging here was very similar and familiar. The headset was well protected on all sides, included were a microfiber cloth, standard velcro-style headstrap, 15-foot combination USB/DisplayPort cable, and AC power adapter. Pretty standard stuff, but more stretch goals are expected to be shipped to backers later this year, such as a cooling fan attachment and eye-tracking module.

The hardware side of setup is simple and intuitive, it's only a matter of plugging in everything where it's meant to go. It's the software side of things where I might expect people to hit a number of snags; I hit a few myself. Pimax asks you to download their 'PiTool' software from their website in order to get everything started. Though the UI of the software isn't overly convoluted or complex, it's not immediately clear what most settings actually do, or which order the user is meant to set things up in. What eventually worked for me was pairing my Vive controllers with the Pimax HMD first, then running room setup in PiTool, then running room setup again, but in SteamVR. The setup experience reinforces the idea that this might be strictly an enthusiast product at the moment, although to be fair, PiTool is still in beta and it shows.

The headset is surprisingly lightweight and comfortable, even with a standard velcro headstrap. On top of the HMD there are two buttons for adjusting volume, and one for power/standby. Underneath the HMD is a built-in microphone, as well as a USB-C port for attaching the various expansion modules that Pimax is developing. On the left there's a 3.5mm input for use with your own headphones or the deluxe audio headstrap coming later. On the right is the IPD adjustment knob for fine-tuning image clarity.

Upon sticking my face into my new toy for the first time, I was immediately floored by the differences between the 5K+ and my original Vive. Awe at the field of view struck first, a whopping 150° horizontal with only the medium setting, closer to 180° at its largest. For those that might not have a lot of experience with VR, the standard is 110° on other headsets currently. To put this in perspective, the sweet spot of the 5K+ lens (where the image is clearest) is about the size of the entire Vive lens. OG Vive has lenses that don't quite reach the edge of my glasses, but the 5K+ extends at least 5 inches outside of my glasses on either side. Being able to move your eyes around inside the headset and still see screen is revelatory.

The differences don't end there, however. The screen-door effect which plagues lower-resolution headsets is almost completely invisible on the 5K+'s dual 1440p panels. I have to stop what I'm doing and really concentrate to see it. God rays are just plain non-existent in the 5K+, where again they've been a massive problem for other HMDs. An unexpected and very welcome improvement.

Not everything is peaches in terms of the display, however, as Pimax opted to go with RGB stripe LCD panels which come with some inherent drawbacks. The colors are less vibrant than OLED and the blacks aren't as deep, more of a grayish color. Thankfully I find that the longer you spend inside the headset, the less noticeable these things become.

So what about performance? As you might expect, driving all this glorious resolution and wide field of view at 90Hz can put a strain on even the most beastly of rigs. At minimum, Pimax recommends a GTX 1080 GPU to get a smooth experience from the 5K+ and 8K. You're also going to want a fairly modern CPU. My PC has an i5-4690K and a GTX 1080Ti, and even I decided to set render scale at 75% for a better framerate and load times in most games.

Compatibility with games and software is far better than I expected. Out of my 100+ SteamVR games, I tried at least fifty and all worked great with the caveat that parallel projections needs to be enabled for some. Same with the ~10 titles I own on Oculus Home.

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Pimax official site​

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