I bought a second hand HTC Vive headset with no controllers, and just the one base station. My PC at the time was, mediocre. Think I had an AMD FX8350 and my trusty GTX970 (still in service). Elite Dangerous just about ran with VR, and the one base station was okay for seated VR but I still had issues with it occasionally fading to grey.

Eventually I just sold it and haven't touched or looked at getting VR since.