HANDS ON with the Fanatec CSL DD - Detailed First Look & Driving Tests

hey guys will here so today tom and i are very excited to be sharing with you our first impressions of the new fanatic csl dd so firstly i wanted to say a big thank you to everybody who voted for their favorite content creators in phonetics poll because obviously we wouldn't be making this video if it wasn't for your support there so thank you very much to everybody who cast their votes now before we get started here i do need to make a couple of little things clear for you what we're looking at today is a pre-production sample so right from the onset you need to understand that this is not exactly the same product that you'll be receiving should you choose to buy a csldd now because of this we won't be following our normal review process that will of course come later once we have our hands on a final production unit while this is of course not quite ideal and we would have loved to be able to put together a proper review before the csldd was available for pre-order the information we've been given by fnatic is quite clear with regards to what's expected to change between this unit and the final production units and what we're going to be looking at today should at the very least give us a good indication as to what we can expect from the final production models when they hit shelves at least when it comes to the general quality of the force feedback characteristics of the motor and little details like that which i think are the things that are most important to you guys watching this video anyway so please do just keep in mind that there are no guarantees that the experience won't change between now and final production now for complete transparency fnatic have asked us to only use the supplied wheel for this video as the design of the base side quick release or this little part here is not quite final yet so we won't really be focusing at all on the interface between the wheel and the base itself in today's video this will of course be looked at in great detail later on once again once we have our hands on the final production model we'll also not be spending too much time looking at the design overall we're not going to be pulling it apart or anything like that instead we're going to focus primarily on the overall driving experience so the aim today is to use this pre-production sample to answer as many of your questions as we possibly can and comfortably can and arm you with as clear a picture as possible prior to reviewing the final production version we're taking a look today at the experience with the standard five newton meter peak rated power supply as well as the upgraded boost kit 180 which unlocks the csl dd's full potential of eight newton meters peak we'll of course be taking a look at the driving experience when mounted on the same high-end cockpit that we use for all of our other wheelbase reviews as well as some cheaper mounting options too along with of course the table clamp accessory which is an optional accessory which can be purchased should you wish to mount one of these to a table so we really want to try and dig in and give you as much information as we possibly can for as many different kind of usage cases and scenarios as we can think of and we will of course also compare the driving experience based on our personal experience to that of some other common wheelbases including the csl elite the csw 2.5 the dd1 and of course the dd2 and we might compare to some other relevant wheelbases from other brands as well we'll be stopping at a few points throughout the video as well to explain some of the terms and buzzwords that you've no doubt heard floating around in reference to the dd so things like direct drive fidelity dynamic range to name a few hopefully by the end of the video you'll have a clear understanding on what all of those terms mean and of course how they relate to the driving experience now while we always do encourage you to watch the entire video so you don't miss any of the important context surrounding the things we're saying we have put some timestamps down in the description to help you navigate to the things that you're most interested in so my hope is by the end of the video you'll have a clearer picture of whether or not the csldd is the right product for you now i will just quickly mention that we have recently published a detailed wheel buyers guide too which will help you guys decide which wheels might best suit your needs and budget if you're looking at picking up some wheels to go with the csld or any of the other wheelbases in the phonetic ecosystem so there's a link down in the description below for that and we also do have some affiliate links down there as well which are a great way of helping out supporting boosted media at no additional cost to you should you choose to do so so on that subject just quickly as well if you would like to understand more about how boosted media operates there is a link down in the description which explains exactly how we go about running the channel so definitely encourage you to check that out as well but anyway i think it's time to get stuck into this csld let's get going so let's quickly power through a couple of details around the product itself before we get into driving as we said before we will do a proper detailed look at a later time once we have our hands on a production unit but there's a couple of things here that i think are important for the context and i'm pretty confident these things won't change at least significantly between what we have here and the final production models so firstly let's just quickly cover compatibility pc and xbox compatible out of the box xbox compatibility comes from a security chip within the actual wheel not the wheelbase so assuming you have an xbox compatible wheel plug this into this wheelbase and it will also be xbox compatible not playstation compatible out of the box unlike with xbox playstation compatibility comes from a security chip inside the base so we do believe from thomas the ceo of fnatic's comments on his blog that there will be some kind of a comparable playstation edition of this coming at some point in the future we don't know exactly when but this particular model isn't playstation compatible now a lot of people might question why it is that they do it that way the simple reason is and actually used to work for sony so i can say this with relative confidence the licensing fees for that security chip for playstation compatibility isn't cheap at all and you can imagine if they included that licensing fee for everybody it would mean that people that didn't need that playstation compatibility would ultimately end up paying for it in the base as well so it makes sense that they have a version which isn't playstation compatible and i expect that we will see something in the future which will give us that compatibility so in my opinion it's a good thing that there is a non-compatible version because it makes it cheaper for those who don't need that functionality don't really understand why they're not releasing two things at the same time but we won't speculate on that i'm sure we'll see something at some point in the not too distant future so footprint-wise we have a measurement of 160 millimeters wide and also 160 millimeters tall so it is the same height as it is wide and 145 millimeters long now again that could always change but i think it's probably unlikely and you can see we've got this kind of aluminium heat sink material in the middle here and the reason for this ridge design is to increase the surface area this in turn allows us to dissipate more heat away from the motor without the need for active cooling so this is completely passively cooled there's no cooling fan internally here and that obviously reduces the amount of noise it also eliminates another potential failure point too so i don't anticipate we're gonna run into any issues with heat here whatsoever look to be honest with you guys every single direct drive wheelbase that we've ever tested here at boosted media has gotten lukewarm at absolute worst so yeah i just don't really see heat being an issue it seems like everybody's kind of on top of that so yeah i don't expect we're going to have any problems with this one either and while we are still on the subject of these ridges here you can actually see the ridges here and here actually double as t-slots so we've got these little included m6t nuts and they slot in like so and that allows us convenient side mounting now if i put this side by side with my dd1 here the measurement between these is actually identical between the dd1 and this now again we can't guarantee that that will stay that way but i don't see any reason why they would change it so if you do have a mounting bracket which is designed for a dd1 you shouldn't have too many issues adapting it to fit you can see the spacing there from my simcore um1 mount is actually the same between that and that one thing you do need to note though is that the dd1 and dd2 are slightly wider than the csldd so if you're using profile sandwich between two uprights then you may need to get some different profile to mounted but again we'll cover mounting solutions in more detail once we've got our hands on the final production model but we have been told that it will be compatible with fanatex mounting solutions and then if we tip it over onto the bottom we can see we've got three more t-slot rails along the bottom here as well so one two and three and again the t-nuts can slide straight in and that allows us to mount in pretty much any configuration we want and importantly the spacing is identical to that of the club support wheelbase 2.5 and the csl elite so if i move this over and quickly flip my club spot wheelbase 2.5 up you can see here the three hole pattern for bolting in and that can be replicated exactly the same on the csl dd so that means that flex aside at least in terms of mounting the wheelbase itself any cockpit or any wheel stand that's compatible with the csl elite or a club support wheelbase 2.5 can also be used with the csl dd which is a good thing so obviously they put some thought into backward and future compatibility there and that is all good things to see so again we will let you know if anything changes there with the final production models once we get our hands on but i don't anticipate it will now front cover and rear cover are made of plastic again that could change so we're not going to comment on that too much we do have two m6 mounting holes on the top here as well for mounting accessories like dashes or phone cradles things like that 50 millimeter spacing between those and that again is identical to the spacing we have on the clubsport wheelbase 2.5 csl elite is the same as well and dd1 and dd2 both have the same so again any accessories that you might have mounted on another fnatic wheelbase you should be able to mount directly onto this without too much drama so let's push these guys aside again so while we're on the subject of mounting we should also take a look at the table clamp accessory so let's flip this over on its side again to reveal those three t-slot rails and this is the base plate so what this essentially does is we've got a little metal pc which screws into this will all make sense in just a moment but this basically slots through here like that so it slots in there it might actually be easier to do this upside down i think so we'll flip it that way hold this in place this slides on like so like that so there we now have the plastic rails in two and then our metal insert in that one and then very similar design to the mount that comes with the csl elite wheelbase for those who are familiar with that this goes into place here and then we have a screw that comes in from the bottom goes through here screws in place like so and then we also have a little knob in the kit as well that allows for a little bit of extra leverage should we wish to use it so we will of course test this out properly later and go for a drive mounted on a table but let's just quickly show you exactly how this mechanism works here first so we slide it all the way back we want to make sure we get it all the way back up against these little stops so we don't get any sort of leverage and flexing going on and then we just tighten up the screw at the bottom remember we do also have this little additional thing that can go on as well just to give us a little bit of extra leverage to tighten it up but you get the idea here it bolts on we can go from five millimeters through to 60 millimeter thickness on the table so it is actually thick enough that you can bolt to a 40 series profile as well if you wanted to use it that way and we have a fixed 15 degrees of tilt here as well so let's take that back off for now and again we'll try this out as a proper driving test a little bit later on i want to put this on the main rig first and just sort of talk about the characteristics of the motor and all those things i think that's more important to begin with we want to know exactly what this motor feels like and how it compares to the other bases in the five meter and eight newton meter modes and then we'll have a look at some of the other scenarios a little bit after that so let's take the table clamp back off now we'll have a quick chat about the actual motor that's inside this guy as well as the inputs and outputs and then we can move across to the power supplies so i'm going to save the chat about the motor itself and some of the design features of that until we're actually up and running on the rig because i want to kind of you know test it out in situ for you guys while we talk about it but one thing i will mention if we just move the dd1 side by side with the csl dd is that there is quite a lot less inertia here so we won't talk about the feeling of spinning it on the shaft at the moment while it's not energized because that's not really realistic and it's not a true test but you can see here when i let go of that shaft it stops spinning pretty quickly there's not a whole lot of weight there not a whole lot of inertia behind it whereas if you compare that with the dd1 you can see that's got quite a lot more weight behind it quite a lot more heft and as i turn that you can see it it keeps spinning quite a lot longer than this one does so it's going to be really interesting to see what kind of an effect that has on the feeling of the motor overall and you know i think it's it's safe to say that the comparison between these two is going to be more than just the overall strength i think there will be some pretty fundamental differences between you know what we actually feel in terms of the effect and the fidelity between the two and i'm suspecting just based off that alone that this bass may actually feel better than the dd1 and the dd2 at those lower torque ranges so again that's speculation at this point but we'll test that out specifically once we get up and running in just a moment but part of the reason for that and the reason why i'm mentioning that now before we move over to the rig is we do have a carbon fiber composite shaft on the motor itself remember we're not talking about the quick release here we're just talking about the part that comes out the nose of the motor i suppose you could say you can't really see it here and again we'll have a proper look at it when we have one of these in final spec to review for you guys but it is a composite shaft there and that reduces the rotational mass or the overall weight of what we're rotating here and that's what allows us to minimize that rotating mass which should lead to overall better fidelity so really excited to test that out and the last thing i want to talk about here before we move on to power supplies is just the inputs and outputs that we have so we've got a usb c type connection for connecting to our xbox or our pc first time we've seen usbc used on a phonetic device so good to see they're moving up into the 21st century we've got a four pin power connection here as well we'll talk about that in just a moment when we have a look at the boost kit 180 and the standard 90 watt power supply another usb-c connection here for some sort of data point don't know anything about that yet so we won't talk about it yet then we've got shifter one which is for our sequential h pattern shifter shifter two which is for a sequential shifter specifically according to the literature that i have access to but again we'll unpack that a little bit more later on we've got our pedal connection here and our handbrake connection so that allows us to connect all of our external peripherals all in through the one usb connection to our pc or our xbox and that is of course one of the strengths of the phonetic ecosystem at least in my opinion is that we're able to kind of bring all those things together have one easy connection to the pc control it all through the one driver interface as well just makes it simple makes it easy to plug and play makes it easy to get up and driving with minimal fuss so let's have a look at these power supplies now this is i know something that a lot of people are wondering about so this is the standard 90 watt power supply that comes with the unit as standard remembering again that when we order one of these we have the choice between the boost kit 180 or the standard power supply so we won't get one of these if we order the boost kit 180 at the same point in time but this is a 90 watt power supply we can see on the specs here output is 24 volts dc 3.75 amps or 90 watts and interestingly here on the little pin out diagram we can see pin 1 2 and 3 are v negative and then pin 4 is our v positive so it looks to me like it's a single rail or single phase of positive power on this power supply then if we move across to the boost kit 180 which you can see is quite a lot larger actually more similar to the size of the power supply that comes with the clubsport wheelbase 2.5 and csl elite so again a much heftier cable here as well same voltage so 24 volts this time 7.5 amps 180 watts as opposed to the what was it it was 90 watts or 3.75 amps of the standard power supply what we can see here on the pin out is that pin 2 and 3 are negative pin 1 and 4 are positive in this case so that leads me to believe that the way the wheelbase is actually detecting the difference between the two power supplies is the fact that one of them is using two separate rails as opposed to the single rail with the normal power supply so i wasn't sure if we were going to see some sort of a dongle or something that we plug into that data port maybe to enable the boost kit 180 and tell it that it's using the more powerful power supply i know one of the questions that a lot of people are asking is will we see after-market power supplies that can be used with the csl dd at maybe a cheaper price to unlock the full eight newton meters of peak torque now fnatic have made it very clear that that will obviously void the warranty so that is a risk that you take but at least from what i can see here it doesn't appear that there's any sort of smarts to this it doesn't appear that it's you know got some sort of a chip inside it that tells it it seems to be just the difference between a single rail or a dual power rail supply now there is pure speculation on my part but there's nothing physical that you plug in other than the power supply to tell the csld that you're using the boost kit 180 as opposed to the standard power supply now the other difference that i just wanted to point out quickly for you as well before we move on is that the boost kit 180 does have a iec connection here so three pins so active neutral and earth whereas the standard power supply the 90 watt power supply just has an active and neutral pin so whether or not that causes any issues in terms of electromagnetic interference or emi uh will you know obviously depend on your situation i've never had an issue with electromagnetic interference on my rig at all with any equipment that i've ever tested here on the channel so i don't anticipate it being an issue here either but when we get to the final production model we will let you know if there are any issues don't anticipate that we're going to have any problems there though so i think that covers everything again let me know in the comments if there is anything else you'd like to know but let's get it set up on the rig now and talk about how the motor feels okay so we've got the base hooked up on my sim labs p1x to begin with as i said before we will be doing some testing on a more entry-level cockpit that will have a little bit of flex in it as well to sort of see where the sweet spot is in terms of whether you're losing too much fidelity to bother upgrading to something like this unless you also upgrade your cockpit of course we'll also test out the table clamp a little bit later on too but the first thing i wanted to do is just talk about the motor itself some of the characteristics around that as well as the menu system now we are running beta drivers here and menu options things like that may change before you guys get your hands on these so i'm not going to spend a whole lot of time going through every single setting or anything like that like we normally would in a review video we do have another video where we take you through all the phonetic settings and explain what all of them do so i would suggest checking that out i'll put a link in the description below for you but just for those who might be brand new to the phonetic ecosystem one of the strengths of this ecosystem one of the things i love most about it is you can access and modify a lot of the force feedback adjustments for all the force feedback adjustments as well as a few other things right from the wheel without having to alt tab out of the game and go and adjust settings there so what we do is we press on the tuning menu and we have five separate presets which we can select through from the wheel itself so you can see setting one setting two setting three setting four and setting five so you can set those up to suit different sims different cars pretty much whatever you want and then switch between them really really easily so say i've been doing eye racing i've got a setting there and then i want to jump across and do something completely different like rally for example all i need to do is press the tuning menu button push up and that's it my setting 2 is now selected and you can see in this case i've limited my rotation to 360 degrees instead of the 900 degrees which we would be using for eye racing so go back to setting one and you can see now i've got the full 900 degrees of rotation so it's as easy as that to jump between settings now one thing i did notice when i first got up and running the default settings that came in these drivers were pretty terrible uh it felt very grainy it felt very kind of all over the place and i was actually quite worried that there might be something wrong with the base initially but i did a little bit of fine tuning spent probably about two hours just kind of fiddling and getting things really dialed into how i like them and i'm very happy to report that we've got this to a place where i'm very very satisfied with it now we are running the five newton meter power supply or the standard 90 watt power supply at the moment but we will comment on the boost kit 180 in just a moment too but just quickly on the menu as well let me just quickly show you a rough idea of how we're adjusting so we go across we can adjust sensitivity force feedback strength scaling natural damper natural friction national inertia force feedback intensity there's a whole bunch of settings here and again i'm not going to run you through all these now because these may change or be slightly different depending on when you get your hands on one of these but again when we do get our hands on the final production unit i will take you through all this in great detail and do some setup guides and tuning guides and things like that to help you get the most out of your experience with the bass so let's exit out of the menu now and talk about the characteristics of the motor now one of the things you guys would have seen if you've watched any of my other wheelbase reviews in the last year or so is i always like to sort of sit in the pits here and just kind of comment on how the wheel feels with the weight of the car kind of transferring across when you don't have a lot of things going on when you don't have a lot of inputs it's a good it's a good way to sort of feel the general characteristics of the motor that will be underpinning all of the force feedback effects that we're feeling a little bit later on now one of the things i commented on with the dd1 and dd2 is there is a slight underpinning level of graininess that has reduced in the more recent firmware updates and drivers i'm happy to say to the point where it's almost completely smooth these days almost on the same level as a simicube2 and i would say that with this after i have done some adjustments there was a quite a bit of graininess there to begin with it is very very very smooth i'd say every bit as smooth as the dd1 and the dd2 i wouldn't say it's smoother definitely smoother than the old experience but with the more updated firmware it's um it's about the same we did end up adding a little bit of natural inertia and natural dampening just to stiffen the wheel up a little bit i did find it was a little bit too free spinning with that reduced weight for my personal preference again remember remembering that i am coming across from a semi cube 2 ultimate which is pretty much you know the best of the best when it comes to bases but again depending on the type of driving that you're doing for drifting for example you're probably going to want as light a wheel as possible so it is good that you have the option of reducing that to pretty much nothing so you can see here in my eye racing setup when i spin the wheel it's got a nice sort of natural amount of rotation that continues in the wheel now and you can see how nice and smooth that is too it's very very very lifelike and you can kind of feel you can see on the screen here as i rotate the wheel the suspension of the car transfers so as the wheels transfer it raises and lowers one half of the car and you can feel that weight through the steering very very nicely as well so these are just little things that i like to kind of look at before we get going but again if you do want to reduce the weight of the wheel for say drifting or something like that if we go across to my second preset you can see now the wheel is spinning very very freely there's barely any inertia there at all and that is due to that carbon fiber composite shaft that we have on the wheel also combined of course with a very lightweight wheel here as well so it's kind of a best case scenario but you get the idea very free spinning and again extremely smooth so yeah very impressed as a initial impression there now one thing that i will mention here is that this is a servo style motor so it's not a hybrid stepper motor like we see in the sim magic m10 for example and it's also not an outrunner motor like we get with the dd1 and the dd2s so advantages of a servo motor is that it's able to maintain high rotational speed at high torque levels so with a hybrid stepper motor what happens is the faster the motor is rotating the lower the amount of torque it's able to produce kind of like a car when you're up in sixth gear going at say you know 110 kilometers an hour and you put your foot down the car can't really accelerate quickly like it can in first or second gear from a lower speed so it's kind of the same thing here with a servo motor like what we have in the csl dd it kind of gives us the best of both worlds we're able to have high rotational speed and maintain those high levels of torque now it is also a german design motor as well they tell me and designed specifically for this usage case so it's not a motor that they've brought across from some other type of system and then implement it into here but again when we get our hands on the final production units we will do a disassembly and show you the internal workings as well you can see here in this exploded view from fnatic just how much stuff there is going on in here and there's all sorts of things like optical transceivers to get the data across to the wheel without the need for a separate cable we've got a inductive coupling system in there as well to get power across to the wheel wirelessly and all those things of course need to be able to do that wirelessly because you need to be able to spin the wheel pretty much infinitely being a direct drive base but again we'll look at all that when we get our hands on a retail unit later now another thing that fnatic have made a big deal about in their marketing so far is their flux barrier technology now that is designed to reduce the amount of torque ripple or cogging effect or the graininess that you feel through the wheel as you kind of rotate it around and as the force feedback kind of comes into play as well so some of the more entry-level direct drive wheels that we've tested in the past do have kind of this underpinning graininess the sim magic m10 in particular was quite bad in that regard you do kind of forget about it once you get up and driving but it was kind of always there and i'm happy to say that after a little bit of fine tuning there was quite a bit of graininess there initially but after a bit of fine tuning in the settings this is very very very smooth so very impressed there it does seem like that flux barrier technology is doing its job well but i think that's pretty much everything we need to cover just sitting stationary in the pits i have very very high expectations now i'll say because you know i was worried that this might feel quite notchy and quite kind of cheap in the hands uh given the price point again remember we are running the five newton-meter power supply right now but let's get out on track now we'll talk about fidelity we'll talk about dynamic range and let's give you our first impressions of this wheel then we'll move on into some other sims we'll give tom a try as well he's coming from a dd-1 so it'll be really interesting to see what his impressions are and yeah let's get out on track so we're in a porsche 911 gt3 cup car at imola in iracing wanted to start off here because this is kind of a familiar testing ground for me i particularly like this car in this track combination because it is quite loose in the rear end it does move around quite a lot particularly the second half of the lap here there's a section where you're kind of braking as you're turning in and the back of the car gets quite loose and i really want to sort of feel whether this wheelbase allows us to feel that movement and react to it quickly enough i really want to test the response time of this wheelbase and i think that's going to be a really great way to do it we will of course test out a bunch of other sims as well as we go through the video but this is going to be what we start off with so let's head out here get a bit of heat in those tyres so the things i'm going to focus on here are fidelity and dynamic range primarily as we get started so fidelity is the feeling that you get through the wheel so the effects the detail that you're getting in those effects as well so things like road texture you know feeling the back of the car snapping around on you feeling the curves feeling the weight of the car all those little details and then dynamic range is the range or i guess the amplitude and volume of those effects so how much variation there is between different effects now one of the advantages of a high-end wheelbase like say a dd1 dd2 simicube or something like that is that we have a larger amount of dynamic range so with say 20 newton meters that we have with the dd1 for example we can go all the way from zero newton meters or nothing through to 20 newton meters of torque and that means that the difference between subtle little effects and something like hitting a wall are quite profound and quite large now what we're running here is five newton meters of dynamic range which means the difference between those small effects and those large effects is quite small so what we can do is we can kind of tune around that a little bit we can make a few sacrifices so for example if we want to feel the effects of road texture and ripple strips and little details like that more strongly we can push those towards the top end of the scale well the top end of the dynamic range and then what we can do is we can actually have it set up so that the um and i'm sliding all over the place here on cold tires we can set it up so that the um so that the effects will actually start clipping when we're doing things like running into walls or jumping over big ripple strips and things like that so it's a bit of a compromise when it comes to lower strength force feedback but the way i've got this set up at the moment is the effects are quite weak at five newton meters and i'm sort of trying to take advantage of as much of the range as possible so what i would say is that the effects are a lot weaker than i'm used to but again we have to look at this from the perspective of are you looking for maximum immersion or are you looking for getting the detail that you need to drive quickly and i think that what i would say is straight out of the box after you know just some fine-tuning adjustments from me for a couple of hours just to kind of get the most out of it is that five newton meters in terms of dynamic range is definitely enough to be competitive so i mean again as we've said many times before on the channel that there's plenty of people that are you know winning esports competitions every day using you know logitech g27s g29s and so forth which are about half the strength of this so it absolutely is possible and what i can tell you is i am feeling all those little details i am feeling the fidelity i'm just not getting the strength at five newton meters so what i've done is jump back into the pits quickly and i'm going to increase my strength just a little bit here and again don't pay attention to the numbers or anything at this point in time because we will do some guides properly later on to explain all this properly for you guys but what i've done is i've increased my force feedback strength a little bit that is going to cause me a little bit of clipping when i'm you know running over big kerbs and things like that but it is going to also increase the detail without clipping in road textures so we're going to see if we can bring out that detail and make the most of the five mutant meters of dynamic range that we have to work with at the moment so let's head out again [Music] and straight away i could feel a little bit more road texture there i'm getting a little bit more detail coming through [Music] and we can see there when we go over the big bump set we are getting a tiny little bit of clipping but it's not enough to really worry about because it's not something that is going to affect our driving in that sense so it's just a trade-off when you're running at lower force feedback levels to bring out that fidelity you do have to make a little bit of a compromise when it comes to the dynamic range just to get that detail out so what i would say is that in terms of the actual fidelity though i am getting every bit as much detail as i get from a dd1 or a dd2 so i would say that [Applause] yeah i think i think i probably will end up wanting to have that boost kit 180 i think that that probably will be where i'll land just because i am missing the overall dynamic range that i'm used to from you know coming from a dd1 dd2 or a simi simicue but i think you know for those looking at stepping up from something like a logitech you're not you're not necessarily missing out like you're not missing out on detail that's going to be important to you to drive quickly or anything like that it's just coming down to wanting to get the best out of this base and knowing that you could get say 40 more dynamic range out of this with just the power supply kind of is an enticing reason to want to buy it so [Music] let's try to pick up the pace a little bit now and i'll just kind of talk you through what i'm feeling in a little bit more detail so hitting the brakes here you can feel the back end of the car getting a little loose on me the rotation's nice and smooth so i'm not getting any sort of sense of notchiness at all through the steering [Music] get it turned in and i think yeah having that little bit of natural inertia and natural friction wound into the settings is definitely helping me it's giving me a little bit more sense of the weight of the car [Music] [Applause] [Music] but i mean i'm just as an initial impression honestly amazed at how good this thing feels i mean i i had high expectations because it's been talked up so much but really when it comes to when it comes to the fidelity that i'm getting here this is every bit as good as a dd1 or a dd2 is which [Music] honestly surprises me a little bit really what it just comes down to is that dynamic range that strength so i think what we'll do now is we'll put tom in we'll get his impressions at the five newton meter range and then we'll put the boost kit 180 on we'll see how that feels and then we'll go ahead and we'll test some other sims because one of the things that i'm really keen to find out is whether we've got good consistency between different sim titles as well that's one of the things that i've always found outstanding about phonetic wheelbases in particular is that you do get quite a uniform experience across different sims so that's definitely something that we want to test out for you guys but yeah initial impression having spent you know a couple of hours now with the bass just fine-tuning settings i'm able to get this to be pretty much exactly what i want in terms of fidelity it just comes down to wanting that little bit of extra dynamic range or that little bit of extra strength so we'll get the boost kit 180 on after tom's had a drive and see whether that makes the difference all right so i'm jumping in here with will settings on here um this is literally the first time i've sat in front of this so it is genuinely first impressions and i'm feeling quite excited about this um yeah as will said this is super smooth um it does feel a bit lighter than the dd1 yeah pretty similar feeling so this is cool okay it does feel a lot lighter than what i'm used to so see how we go here but gosh it's smooth whoa [Applause] all right so straight away in comparison to the dd1 which i use a fair bit it's um a lot lighter obviously it's the you know i'm not feeling nearly as much overall force and it feels like when i'm just going down a straight and wiggling it around it's like oh is anything going to happen here but then when i'm under brakes and and hitting curbs i am feeling what i need to feel so it's i guess that's a testament to the the smoothness of it it's really smooth um for my liking compared to wheels settings i'd probably just add a little extra dampening in there i'm feeling now that the boost kit's going to be pretty valuable okay that's my initial feeling yeah the overall feel of this it feels like it's good quality like i feel like the hardware is is where it should be it's like the smoothness the overall kind of feelings i'm getting they all seem right hey like it's just it's all there i just want more so let's check on the other kit all right yeah it's good okay so we're running the boost kit 180 now so we've increased our maximum dynamic range to eight newton meters instead of five so about forty percent more and let's see how we feel now for reference to sake with my super cube to ultimate which i drive on a daily basis i usually have that running at around about 9 to 12 newton meters depending on the car so that's what i'm used to not too far off what we have here but immediately i'm feeling that additional weight in the steering is definitely helping me straight away i can feel i can feel the weight of the car a little bit better now remember this is just one car it is just one driving style and we will you know do we will test out a bunch of other stuff as we progress through the video and then come back at the end and give our general reflections but you can kind of think of the boost kit like a multiplier so it's basically just boosting everything that we were feeling before so the slight ever so slight graininess that was there before is a little bit more pronounced now as well but certainly not to the point where i would say it was problematic it's something that you really do have to pay attention to to feel at all and certainly no worse than we have with the dd1 or dd2 so i'd say again even though it is a different style motor design being a servo motor instead of an outrunner motor overall the characteristics and what i'm actually feeling through the force feedback is very similar and i'd say [Music] i guess to answer the big question just as an initial impression at least is if you're if you have experience with a dd1 or a dd2 and you've you know maybe you've been in a mate's place and used one and found that the 20 meters or 25 newton meters was just way too much for you and you ended up winding down the force feedback strength to about sort of eight newton meters then the experience that i'm having with this is pretty much the same there's nothing there's nothing particularly remarkable about what i'm feeling with the csl dd that sets it apart from a dd1 or a dd2 the experience overall is very similar that's kind of what i expected given that we are basing off the same firmware i'm assuming they're using a lot of the same algorithms and things to drive the force feedback in the back end and as we know as we've talked about in many other videos in the past so much of what goes on see there i was able to catch that slide with relative ease i still got out of shape and still lost a bunch of time but i could feel what was going on with the car i could feel the weight of the car transferring around which is what i needed to but yeah as i was saying force feedback so much to do with force event comes from the firmware and the drivers and all those things that are necessary to communicate and adapt celebratory data into what you're actually feeling through the wheel and of course being a direct drive wheel as well every single little thing that comes through you feel there's no dampening through belts or anything like that so a bad force feedback wheel is made worse by the fact that it's direct drive a good one is made better by the fact that it's direct driving i'm happy to say that the experience here is i wouldn't say exceptional in terms of the overall driving experience because it's no better than i've had with other products in the past but when you consider the price point [Music] i guess the best way i can describe this is kind of how i described the bj sim racing pedals that i tried the other day if this was the only wheelbase that i had access to i'd be perfectly fine i feel like at eight newton meters of torque here i'm feeling the things i need to feel and while coming from a more powerful wheelbase i do miss that additional strength a little bit i'd say if i was stepping up from something like a thrust master base or you know even a club sport wheelbase 2.5 which is you know about the same strength as this overall i'm feeling all the things i need to feel in so much more detail so much more fidelity than before [Music] to the point where i don't really you know unless i'm concentrating on it i don't really miss that strength and again you know it is just the one style of driving we're doing at the moment we'll comment on this in more detail once we've done some other driving i'm going to try out rally next we're going to do some dirt track in a fiesta around a rallycross tracking eye racing see how the car kind of reacts to slides and then we'll do some testing through pretty much every single other sim as well so we'll give a set of course competition automobilista 2 dirt rally 2 f1 2020 race room we'll give a try as well we'll give everything a try but i think the best thing we can do from here is do a bunch of testing in a bunch of different sims and then bring everything together with some thoughts and conclusions to give you a good overall picture because i don't think there's really any need to make you sit through hours and hours and hours of first impressions in every single sim i'm hoping that the uh that the experience will be pretty uniform between the different sims that's something that we've experienced before so we'll definitely comment on that we'll let you know if there's anything that kind of jumps out in any particular experience but yeah look in f as far as the boost kit 180 is concerned initial impressions wise i would say if you have the money and you're you know finding that something like a you know logitech g29 or something like that is far too weak for you or maybe you've used a direct drive wheelbase or a stronger wheelbase on somebody else's rig before and kind of felt like you really valued that extra strength then yes the boost kit is absolutely worth it it really does well it gives you it gives you about 40 percent more dynamic range and i'd say that that is definitely adding to the experience in a similar level of proportion but the important thing to understand here is that it's not increasing the fidelity so even though we are feeling the details stronger than we were before because of the dynamic range the actual detail that's there so the road textures the feeling of running up on curves the feeling of you know bumping over ripples and things like that is the same underpinning underneath that so it's kind of like turning up the volume basically you can have good bass you can have good sound quality on a sound system at low volume levels but then often when you turn things up you start to get clipping and you start to get all sorts of distortion and funny things going on like that what i'm finding here is that this is basically like you know taking a small speaker that's really good quality already making it bigger making it more powerful but not really you know not really affecting the overall sound quality just increasing the volume so i guess that's probably the best way i can describe this as an initial impression but let's jump in let's do some other sims now we'll do a whole bunch of testing and then we'll bring it all together with our conclusions [Music] okay so we tested as promised across a range of different sims start off with eye racing of course as you've already seen we did do some dirt track racing and rally cross in eye racing as well just to sort of test and see you know how the car responded to rapid changes in steering angle road textures on dirt and across grass ripple strips and those kinds of things then we moved across into a set of corsa we did a center course of competition as well of course dirt rally 2 and f1 2020 so we found the experience was pretty consistent across all of the sims that we tested we've kind of come to expect that from fnatic to be honest with you guys when we've reviewed other wheelbases as well that's kind of been a standout feature and definitely was the case again here despite running early internal beta version drivers which we were a little bit concerned about might cause us some problems but we didn't have any problems at all getting up and running in any of the sims that we tested which was of course very encouraging we would expect that you know if that's the experience that we have with beta drivers then the experience with the final release drivers should be even more you know stable and consistent and we didn't really notice anything in particular about any one sim that kind of made it stand out from any others in terms of the way the force feedback felt or anything like that obviously eye racing does tend to lack a little bit more than some of the others when it comes to things like road textures i said of course the competition was probably the stand out there in terms of how it relayed the information when you go across ripple strips and across grass to kind of just catch a tire on the edge of dirt and things like that off the side of the track but other than that very consistent between the different sims and i think that's a really important point to make because it is something that i think is important particularly for people that are jumping in and out of different sims quite regularly you know if you're sort of used to one sim then you want to go and play something else often you know you end up having to retrain yourself to drive the other thing and then when you go back to the original one you have to learn to drive again all over again so that's definitely something that i've struggled with in the past with some other wheelbases but i've always really enjoyed the experience with fnatic wheelbases because of the fact that you can just kind of jump between different sims obviously each sim does have its own subtle nuances and then you know they don't all feel exactly the same as each other but when it comes to what's important to going quickly and consistently i always find that phonetic wheelbases seem to be the most consistent between them so i'm of course coming from a semi-cube to ultimate on my daily driver which is capable of over 30 newton meters of peak torque i generally run it at around about maybe 9 to 12 maybe 15 newton meters depending on the car that i'm driving what do you normally run you're running you're coming from a dd once yeah so the dd1 and i think i usually have that around 15 16. okay so you're racing a little bit stronger than me yeah well we knew that just by looking at me that's true that's true so i definitely did feel like i was missing that little bit of extra strength overall yeah yeah and did you find that with the with the eight meter as well with the boost kit 180 yeah i mean it was a definite improvement and it did eliminate a lot of that sort of lifelessness that i was kind of feeling with five newton meters yeah uh the detail was there with the five but yeah um it just wasn't a very exciting experience overall yeah and i think what a lot of people end up doing and kind of what i was alluding to when we were doing the eye racing testing earlier on is when you have limited dynamic range what you end what you inevitably end up doing is cranking up all the lower end effects and end up clipping on the higher effects so when you're bumping over a big curb or hitting a wall or crashing into other cars you know those kinds of details that aren't so important in terms of the way they feel other than the fact that you know you know that you've hit something you know often you have to crank up beyond the point of clipping for those to bring out the detail in the finer stuff like road textures ripple strips grass and such so you know there are settings that you can adjust in some sims the drivers themselves often have settings too for linearity so usually with higher dynamic range direct drive wheel bases you know such as your simi cubes and your dd1 dd2s and so forth you'll often you know generally recommend that you run linearity switched on because that gives you the full use of the dynamic range all the way through whereas with lower powered wheelbases typically you know up until now belt driven stuff and cog driven stuff what you do is you'd run that linearity setting off so that you could kind of boost the signal strength of the lower stuff so you'd still get that strength in there but you'd not be clipping like crazy in the higher end stuff yeah so feeling around with those settings a little bit we were able to bring out that detail a little bit more but i agree with you 100 there i think that you know the the finite detail is definitely there you can definitely feel those little subtle textures but the overall strength in the dynamic range side of things was just a little bit lacking particularly with the five newton meter strength but with the eight newton meter as well compared to what we're used to but i think that we also have to consider that you know for somebody that's coming from say a 2.5 newton meter logitech g29 or something like that this is still a big jump up even at five newton meters it's a big jump but we'll notice a big difference absolutely and i think the other important thing to acknowledge here as well is that when it comes to esports we know and we've seen time and time again that you know so many people choose to use more entry-level gear because they don't want to have big you know they don't want to be fighting the wheel distracting yeah they want to be you know they're focused purely on just going fast and only wanting to feel the things that are necessary to go fast and i think that's really where this is a very very compelling product because you're getting all of that detail you're getting all that really fine stuff that's genuinely going to make you be able to react faster but you're feeling all that detail and so i think that this is probably going to end up being the wheelbase that we'll see in esports competitions i think a lot of um you know these sim racing centers commercial places where you can go and organize competitions and stuff will probably end up buying these simply because they do everything that you kind of want in that kind of setting but you know obviously the cheap they're cheap compared to something like a cmcube2 or a dd1 or dd2 so i think that when it comes to people that just want to feel that detail and aren't too concerned about the dynamic range side of things or the overall strength then you know the five newton meter option with the standard power supply is probably perfectly fine i think if you're after the more immersive experience and you're not so worried about making it you know allowing yourself to go faster then you know the boost kit is probably a good option yeah i'd say it's definitely a valuable upgrade going into the boost kit it's it's worth that extra money for the immersion but it is for the immersion and not necessarily for the consistency or speed i think is probably the important thing to note here yeah i think you're probably right yeah you're not gonna you're not gonna go faster with the boost kit but you'll probably have a better time more fun yeah but you also need to consider what you're going to be mounting it on as well so what we did find we did do some pretty extensive testing across various different mounting solutions obviously we tested primarily on our sim labs p1x which is really super solid and you know allows us to feel all the little nuances and characteristics of the motor which is what we obviously wanted to test for the primary reason for making this video but we also did test on a next level racing gt light and that does have quite a bit of flex in it admittedly it's not really designed for a direct drive wheelbase so you know we're not we're not having a go at the product by any means but we think it's important because there are going to be a lot of people that are looking at this as an upgrade for an existing cockpit they might be on a limited budget and they don't want to spend anything more they don't want to go down the rabbit hole of having to you know reinforce their cockpit spend a whole lot of money on things that they weren't expecting to have to spend money on in order to get a good experience out of the base so i found that the the standard power supply so the 90 watt five newton meter peak torque was okay it definitely didn't give me quite the same fidelity in terms of that finite detail uh just due to the dampening effect of the flex in the cockpit um eight newton meter i found was pretty much out of the question with um with a you know with a more flexi cockpit so i would say buy the five newton meter version and upgrade your cockpit then if you're still wanting more get the eight newton meter version i don't think that you're really going to be getting your money's worth out of the boost kit if you are mounting it to a more flexi cockpit because you know it does have that dampening effect and you are losing that little bit of detail and you find that the strength is kind of almost creating more flex so it actually ends up being more difficult to drive the more you turn up the force feedback so because it's not only dissipating some of that that strength in the wheelbase exactly but it's also then rebounding and creating these other vibrations exactly it's creating it's creating inconsistencies and variables that wouldn't otherwise be there and it's interesting because when we were using the thrust master tspc on that same cockpit we didn't really feel like the cockpit was a weak link there no i guess that's an indicator a little bit of a weaker base but again because we have that extra detail here that we weren't feeling yeah on those other bases i think that's really where you kind of go oh hang on this feels yeah this feels different exactly whereas when you don't have that detail you don't miss it yep so yeah i think we would definitely recommend if you're looking at spending the money on the boost kit definitely make sure that you are going to be mounting it to a relatively stable surface what we were impressed with though was the table clamp that had very minimal flex in it it's a solid tablecloth it is yeah it has a little bit of wiggle in it just in the rubber bumpers in the bottom so it can flex a little bit maybe you know one or two degrees but provided you've got it mounted to a pretty solid table and this table that we tested on isn't the most solid table in the world but you know provided that it is mounted to a relatively stable and solid surface i think that you'd be absolutely fine with the eight newton meter yeah i was you know i didn't really find it to be rattling things around too much at all so yeah it was definitely doable and yeah probably a more pleasant experience than on the the gt lights absolutely yeah i was instantly faster with it mounted to the table than i was with the flexi cockpit so that is definitely an important factor yeah i think the issue with table mounts though is usually around the pedals though so well that's true curing your pedals is usually the bigger problem there absolutely yeah and that's a subject for another video we will be testing the new csl pedals in the next few weeks as well so that's exciting so yeah i think to summarize the points there if you're mounting to a table that's nice and solid you're not going to have too much flex there then the boost kit 180 absolutely okay if you're mounting it to a flexi cockpit then probably don't get the boost kit i'd invest that money into a more stable mounting solution beforehand boost kit only really necessary if you want the extra dynamic range you want that extra immersion if you're just interested in going quickly and consistently then you probably don't need to spend that money but yeah overall a very consistent a very good experience and yeah absolutely met my expectations what do you feel about that yeah i'd say it met expectations probably went over them a little bit given the price of this thing i mean you know given given the price point i think and i mean i was quite i was quite critical early on i think that that first video that i did when they announced it i kind of said come on guys don't get caught up in this dd hype because yeah you know people sort of they do associate the term direct drive with awesomeness and as we've seen before you know direct drive doesn't necessarily mean a great experience it all comes down to how it's implemented the quality of the motor the quality of the drivers the you know the firmware all those things contribute and because of the nature of these things if you've got bad quality signals coming into the motor you're going to feel all that garbage and it's not going to be a good experience so we have tested wheelbases before that are direct drive that haven't felt as good as belt driven bases so yeah which one uh the sim magic m10 i don't think is as good as the club sport wheelbase 2.5 for example yes so fair cool yeah yeah feel the same way about it so uh yeah i agree with you but i mean you do get used to that kind of grittiness yeah and you can almost i almost like to think of it as its engine noise in the car vibrating like you do get used to it absolutely you do you do adjust to it and you don't notice that it's there until you go to something else and you're like oh yeah oh this is actually pretty good yeah exactly yeah so i think that when you consider all those things the point i'm trying to make here is that just because a wheelbase is direct drive doesn't necessarily mean that it's awesome and because of that i was skeptical going in because of the price point i didn't think that this was going to be as good as fnatic were kind of making out it was going to be and as soon as i started using it i was well as soon as i got my settings dialed in i was like wow okay yeah this is actually really darn good so i think another driving style where this is going to be really popular and unfortunately we couldn't really test this to the extent that we wanted to because we only had the mclaren wheel to test with but i gave it a go i did give it a go but it kind of didn't work um obviously when we get our hands on the production unit and we can put whatever wheel we want on it we'll test this extensively for you guys but i think that for drifters and ralliers is that how you say rally is rally drivers yes yeah i think for drifters and rally drivers this is going to be really popular as well particularly for drifting because you do have that rapid response time you do have the fast reactions you know it does rotate really nice and quickly at least in the experience that we've had so far and that is obviously something that's really important for drifting and rally more so than overall strength and dynamic range there so i think this is going to be a really popular wheel and really good value wheel for people that are interested in drifting i know the sim magic m10 has been quite popular for drifting because of that it's relatively cheap but it gets the job done yeah so this being even cheaper still yeah kind of just makes sense yeah so you've been a bit critical of the dd1 with its graininess yeah in the past yeah a bit better since the firmware update yes i think since about the 380 driver and firmware it's been a lot smoother a lot closer and when i say i was critical of it like it the reason i was critical of it was because it wasn't as smooth as the um the semi cube twos basically so you know it when you when you're driving kind of like what we said with the m10 when you're driving and you kind of focus on everything that's going on you didn't really notice it at least in my opinion you agree yeah i agree yeah doesn't it bother me it doesn't bother you at all where does this sit on the graininess level on the graininess level i found this to be about the same as what the dd1 and dd2 are now okay i think it was surprisingly smooth i think because of the carbon fiber composite shaft and the lower rotating mass i was expecting it to feel a little bit more grainy because you don't really have that weight to kind of and that inertia to kind of balance it out and dampen it but didn't really turn out to be the case so i think that this flux barrier technology that fnatic have been making a big deal about in their marketing does seem to be doing a pretty good job if we have a look at the expanded view here you can see where the magnets are on the stator or the rotor and then you can see the coils around the outside what creates that torque ripple as it's called or graininess or cogging effect is as the magnets kind of rotate past each magnetic field there's a bit of a transition period the magnetic force isn't consistent all the way around so what that technology is doing is it's trying to sort of equalize that magnetic force throughout the rotation to balance it out and make it as smooth as possible so it isn't as smooth as the vrs direct force pro it isn't as smooth as the sim magic alpha that we tested it isn't as smooth as a simicube2 sport pro or ultimate but all of those things are a lot more expensive than what this is and i would say for me at least and again remembering that it is a pre-production unit here so we can't guarantee the experience is going to be the same with the final production ones i would put it on par with the way the dd1 and the dd2 feel at the moment in terms of terms of grain in terms of graininess yeah okay so i would have said it probably is a little bit smoother than the dd1 okay in terms of graininess yeah well you have a lot more experience than i do with the dd1 so but that was kind of relative to how much dynamic range there was so okay so if you start to crank up your force a bit to to bring up those details more yeah then the graininess comes up with it and it doesn't feel more grainy than the dd1 okay um but when you're using it appropriately without you know clipping too much yeah then it felt smoother but yeah everything's less so that's yeah i think that what it boils down to there is you know when you're when you're using it within its design parameters then i don't think that graininess is going to be an issue for people i don't think it's going to be like oh god this is great this is horrible and what i will note is that when we when we did first take it out of the box and pair it all up with just the default driver settings again remembering they were internal beta drivers that were using it was horrendously grainy it was terrible yeah right i actually thought that it was broken i nearly rang them up and said hey guys i think we've got a problem here but when i went in and started tweaking some of the settings and you know adding some natural damper some natural inertia and stuff like that i was able to filter that out no problem so hopefully when it's released to public it'll be you know i would imagine i would imagine that they'll have some sort of a default setting in there that gives people a you know a good starting point out of the box because otherwise there are going to be a lot of people you know complaining yeah so yeah i don't think that's going to be an issue but you know we have to we have to say it for what it is it was a little bit funny out of the box so on that subject a couple other little points that we made here just to highlight before we move into answering the bigger questions is uh quietness so oh definitely it's incredibly quiet yeah it's quieter than the dd1 the dd2 is quieter it doesn't have that sort of electronic resonance sound that we noticed at least that we sometimes get out of the semi cubes as well that kind of singing sound so definitely i would say the quietest direct drive bass that i think i've tested yeah i remember thinking the vrs direct force was very quiet as well it did have that electric resonance it was a little bit every so often though yeah yeah so um and the the um magic alpha was quite quiet i mean they're all quite yeah direct drive basis this was definitely the quietest you're not going to have a problem with noise yeah and um while we're speaking about that actually we should talk about the passive cooling as well so throughout the testing and we did put this through you know a good six or seven hours of pretty solid driving uh it only got lukewarm to touch so i know quite a few people were concerned not having a fan um it might overheat and you know have to scale back the power delivery and things like that but again pre-production so we don't know but i wouldn't imagine the performance would be worse on final production yeah heat definitely hasn't been an issue so that was one other thing to note yep so you mentioned that you were quite impressed that it's a usbc connection here yeah do you not find it a little flimsy so i knew you were going to bring that up okay so we've got the usbc connection here and again we don't know that this is the final cable they're going to be including but if you have a look on the back you can see there's a little cutout here so there's a little recess there but the plug itself doesn't completely fit in that recess and i'm having trouble getting it in there there we go so it's in and there is quite a bit of wiggle room there so i i'm just concerned that because the plug is a lot more flimsy than a usb b connection it's great that they are using usb-c because obviously that has the potential for higher uh throughput in terms of data but i can see people bumping that cable and breaking off the connection from the pc i was thinking it might be wise to cable tied onto the power yeah some sort of a strain relief mechanism i think is going to be necessary that is assuming that they do end up including the same cable with the production versions i'm hoping that they don't i'm hoping that they change the plug it seems like it's designed for a different plug so i wouldn't be surprised if it was a different cable that we get yeah again pre-production so we don't know but that was just one little thing that kind of was a bit of a red flag for me as we said the design kind of does lend itself to you know having a plug that fits in that little recess perfectly so it can't really move from side to side and you know it would pull out before it was to damage the connection but you know for those of us who have snapped connections off arduino boards before which i think is pretty much all of us you know what we're talking about here and obviously you don't want to be snapping a connector off a uh expensive direct drive wheelbase so just be aware of that if they do end up having the same connection you will just want to have some sort of a strain relief there it's as simple as just cable tying it to the power supply now while we're nitpicking one other little thing that did frustrate me a little bit and again this could change for final production was the little t-nuts little m6 t-nuts that they include which slide into the base as we showed before all the sides to mount this thing they don't have a little spring ball or a spring leaf or anything like that to hold them into place so when you're trying to sort of put the base on something and screw in from underneath they slide all over the place and it's we actually needed two people to get pretty frustrated once it's screwed down it's not a problem at all they you know it all secures in place and it's perfectly fine so don't think it's going to be a problem while you're driving or anything like that but just to give you an idea what we're talking about we've got a spring leaf type t-nut here as well as a spring ball type so what these do is the little spring ball of the little spring leaf kind of sits in position and locks it in place so you can slide it but it's kind of an intentional thing rather than something that happens by accident so once you put it in the position you want it stays there and that wasn't the case with the ones that were included with the pre-production at least so just another thing that i'm hoping might change before but just something to be aware of when you are mounting it you might need a second person to deal with that just a small thing but you know we've got to call these things out small things a thing that's right and um you know if we tell them then they can hopefully improve it before these hit the shelves so now with regards to the power supplies it was interesting to see that the only difference that we could see at least on the pin outs on the power supplies themselves was that one was using a single pin for positive three pins for negative and the boost kit 180 was using two pins for positive two pins for ground which sort of leads us to believe that the only difference between them is just two power rails versus one power rail which would make sense because one's 90 watt and one's 180 watt so you know one rail per 80 watts of power we don't know that there isn't some sort of a handshake going on some sort of a circuit inside the power supply that's being read across those pins or something like that maybe it's just measuring resistance or you know there's all sorts of things that they could be doing internally to you know make it so you can't just get a different power supply but there wasn't a dongle or anything like that that we had to plug in to tell it that we had a boost kit which i was a little bit surprised by i thought that you know given the markup that they have on these which we've talked about before you know i was expecting it to you know potentially be quite secure in that sense maybe there is something there that we just don't know about and again it could change for the final productions but just something that i thought was interesting there too and beyond that in terms of analyzing the hardware we really do need to wait for the production models because i think that you know there's going to be some things internally that we'll want to look at we obviously want to unpack the software more go through settings explain how all the menus and all those sorts of things work too but we don't want to do that on pre-production software and pre-production hardware so we'll leave that for the proper review of the production model when we get our hands on that so i guess it's time now to address i guess what are going to be the big questions that the community are going to have so we have been sort of keeping an eye on a lot of their conversations online and twitter and facebook's and escape it at the moment no you guys say that at the moment so we've what i've done is i've written down what i think are the most important questions here from the community so first question is it a worthwhile upgrade from something like a logitech g27 g29 or maybe even a g923 if somebody's bought one of those in the last year maybe looking at upgrading i think there has been a lot of people you know through the pandemic situation that have obviously you know dipped their toes into sim racing at a you know more you know cheaper level and then they might be looking to upgrade and this is something that's going to be really enticing for them so what do you think about that what do you think in terms of upgrading from something like a g27 for example yes yes basically to me the difference between those two it's like having a playstation vibration controller yeah to having actual force feedback yeah it's a bigger difference i don't know if i'd go that far because there are you know there are people that are very very fast on those older wheels but again okay but still there's other ways to train your brain that is true and we've we've covered that in a lot of other videos so we'll put some links down below to sort of you know give you a bit of perspective around why we're saying that when you're talking g27 level to this it's a completely different it is a totally different experience at least in terms of immersion and you know feeling what's going on with the car through your hands rather than relying on what you're seeing on the screen yep i think it's an important thing there so what else have i written here all right differences night and day when it comes to the details you feel across every sim that we tested and again that's a really important thing it was considered across all the different sims yeah also much quieter too so if uh if your wife or your girlfriend or your kids are being woken up by your g27 which is very loud pretty likely then this is going to be a problem solver for you so yeah keep that in mind as well so what i wrote here was if you've been holding out for a more affordable upgrade path into direct drive then really i think this is a no-brainer and you're not going to be disappointed so yep you'd agree with that yeah yep cool cool cool so next question is it worthwhile upgrading from something like a thrust master tspc or a csl elite what do you think well it depends doesn't it you spent quite a lot of time with the csl elite before you had the dd-1 so you're probably more qualified to yeah i did and and i think the biggest the biggest thing that i like about this over the csl elite is the noise because the csl yeah very loud it is very loud so i went from a logistic g27 straight to a club sport wheelbase 2.5 and then you know i'd had probably about nine or ten months experience using that before i reviewed the csd sorry the csl elite so that was a jump backwards for me and i really noticed despite it having the same motors and electronics as the classical wheelbase because of the different belt design and cog design and everything um i did find it to feel quite robotic compared to the clubspot wheelbase 2.5 i described it at the time as kind of the force feedback feeling like you've got a golf ball and a cup and yeah that's a good way to say it yeah yeah so it's kind of it has that robotic clunkiness to it whereas this is smooth and finessed and you you feel the grain in the road texture you feel the detail it doesn't just feel like you're being wrapped just clunks yeah yeah i agree with that but in terms of whether or not it's worth it i mean that depends doesn't it well i mean if you again it comes down to do you just want to go fast or do you yeah but also if it means you're going to have to eat vegemite sandwiches for the next six months to to make that upgrade yeah then no i don't think it's worth it yeah i'd agree but if it means you just don't go out to dinner on friday night once yeah and it's a month and it also comes down to what you can get secondhand for your older gear too of course secondhand prices are absolutely crazy with the issues with you know supply and demand so true you know you there's you've got a much better chance of getting a good price for something that you're upgrading from and upgrading to this at the same time so what i wrote here is despite the strength being similar i'd still say yes the details feel far smoother and less robotic which does make the experience more enjoyable and more immersive it's also once again a lot quieter which is an important factor for a lot of people so yeah agreed yep cool cool all right so what about compared to a club support wheelbase 2.5 i think this is where it's a little bit funny because it's around about the same price it's around about the same newton meters if you get the boost kit so it's yeah it's kind of created a bit of confusion there and even thomas the ceo of fanatec kind of you know hinted without directly saying it in the blog that you know he considers this to be a superior product to the club spot wheelbase 2.5 so what do you think about that well it makes you wonder about the future of the csl csw 2.5 doesn't it definitely yeah they haven't they have said thomas did say that the um the csl elite is being discontinued so we can kind of you know say unless you're looking at one second hand then you know you're not going to be buying one of those anyway unless it's existing stock with the clubsport wheelbase 2.5 i do believe they're going to be continuing selling that for a while at least i don't know um but they have also hinted that they will be bringing the range across to direct drive so everything's going to be direct drive right eventually club sport dd so we could see a club sport wheelbase dd there is a bit of a gap in my mind between you know the eight newton meters that we get with this with the boost kit 180 and the 20 newton meters peak that we get from the dd1 15 newton meters holding 20 peak i think that we're probably going to see a club spot wheelbase dd at some point that will probably be somewhere between 12 and 15 newton meters somewhere around there yeah so what i would suggest and again this is a guess i don't know what's coming but i think that unless you can get a really good secondhand price for your clubspot wheelbase 2.5 you know this this is in my opinion better but there's not enough in it to justify you know i wouldn't consider it a massive upgrade i guess is what i'm saying from club sport wheelbase 2.5 i think you know i really love my 2.5 it was i think i would always go as far as saying that if i wasn't doing this as a job and i still had that base that i bought i'd be happy with it and i probably wouldn't really feel the need to upgrade it yeah so yeah and i think that most people that have that base probably feel quite similar so not a huge upgrade from the club sport wheelbase 2.5 but an upgrade nonetheless in my opinion again it's not about the dynamic range it's just about that detail and that's that fidelity so i think if you can get a good secondhand price for a club sport wheelbase 2.5 you can make something it makes sense to do it i think you know if this if the 2.5 is going to be hitting the scrap heap and you're forking out for this completely from scratch then maybe not so much so what i said in my notes here was if i were wanting more from my club support wheelbase 2.5 i'd probably save for a dd1 or a simicube 2 sport or a vrs direct force pro or wait to see if fnatic releases a clubsport wheelbase dd at around the 10 to 15 newton meter ranges i think this will be a more substantial upgrade i don't think that the csld is going to blow you away coming from the clubsport wheelbase 2.5 as it's already a very good base but there's no denying that the fidelity is more pronounced on the csl dd both with and without the boost kit 180. agreed i'm not used to csw you don't have a whole lot of experience with it that's true so um yeah but i i did use that wheelbase exclusively for nine months so i know it pretty well um i did spend some time driving with it again recently with the more updated drivers as well just to sort of see how it changed so yeah i think ultimately it comes down to what you can get secondhand for your clubsport wheelbase 2.5 but i don't think this is going to blow you out of the water coming from one of those yeah i think that's probably the best way to summarize it so what about people who and there actually has been quite a few of these people uh that either bought a dd1 or a dd2 recently and are now going oh i wish i'd waited or that have already owned one and are thinking about actually selling it and then buying one of these instead so the justification that i've seen is people saying well i run my dd1 on my dd2 at around about eight newton meters anyway so do i really actually need that or should i just go with one of these would it be a better fit for me so let me just read out what i've written in my notes here and then feel free to jump in at any point and disagree okay so i wrote for me i couldn't tell a huge difference between the csl ddd and the dd1 dd2 at the same torque settings what i mean there is if i set my dd1 on my dd2 to those torque levels i couldn't feel a big difference between these and those wheelbases that goes for with and without the boost kit but i do prefer a bit more inertia and friction in my wheels than some others might so and we kind of talked about that before i did end up turning up that inertia just to give it a slightly more weighty feeling to simulate the feeling of a steering rack in a real car for esports drivers drifters and so forth you're probably not going to be doing that so it may be a little bit different so i'd say by all means if you find that you only ever run your dd1 or dd2 at similar torque values to what we can get out of this guy and don't find that you miss having that extra dynamic range then by all means sell the dd1 or dd2 and buy this i don't really see any reason why you'd be disappointed but for me i'd probably still at some point want to upgrade purely for more dynamic range i think if fnatic would have come out with a csw dd again as we mentioned before at around 10 to 15 meters then that's probably where i begin to start questioning the purpose of anything stronger for the majority of people so i do i do think that you know and i've said this quite clearly before i think that the simicube 2 ultimate is complete overkill for pretty much everybody outside of a commercial kind of thing i think that the simicube2 pro is more than enough i think that and we did this when we compared the dd1 and the dd2 i said you know unless you really need that extra dynamic range unless you're dwayne johnson then um you know you're probably okay with the dd1 all the other things like warranty and the kill switch being included aside for me using this when i ran it at with the five newton meter power supply i did max it out at 100 and i wanted more when i ran it with the boost kit 180 i maxed it out at eight newton meters and i still kind of missed having that little bit of extra as i said before with my um with my semi 2 ultimate i do run that at around sort of 9 to 12 sometimes 15 depending on the car so this was a little bit on the weaker side for me what do you what do you think about that yeah i think you're really missing out on the corner forces yeah it's it's that feeling of the car going around the corner and fighting against it that kind of yeah um when it comes to the sharp more impact kind of things hitting your curves that kind of stuff it's fine like yeah absolutely get a really nice quick response out of it which yeah which is more than enough definitely but the corner forces really were missing and i'm pretty glad to be going back to the dd-1 because of that yeah it's okay it's it's very valuable to me yeah and i i wonder if you're running your dd1 at eight newton meters are there some other settings that you might be able to that's what i'm thinking too i think we're missing out a bit there yeah i think that it might be worth doing another sort of updated settings and fine tuning video because we did do that video a while back where we kind of went through the entire tuning menu and explained what everything does yeah but i think it might be good to sort of maybe make like a fundamentals course or something where we actually say all right so you've got your new dd yeah let's go through and actually get the most out of this for your but in a nutshell if you're turning your talk right down that fast so that you don't have the big extremes yeah you can instead be sort of squishing everything up yeah rather than just bringing well that's kind of that's what like what the compressor does it's squishing the audio signal to make everything the same rather than just bringing it down but you're losing that dynamic range and that kind of flow so yeah yeah so so yeah i really feel like 15 is where you start getting the most out of it yes i'd agree with somewhere between for me 10 to 15. again it will depend on how strong you are um there are plenty of people that i know that run 20 plus newton meters and you know can't drive anything less so really obviously a lot bigger than i am it's interesting yeah i would have thought that you know they'd still be sensitive to the lower torques it just means that they can handle the bigger ones as well i don't know but again it just comes down to that dynamic range i mean if you're if you're peaking out at 20 newton meters when you're going over bumps then yeah you know unless you're running linearity mode off yeah and you're kind of bringing up everything else as well then yeah but i guess the point here is that you know for both of us we wouldn't sell our dd1 or dd2 to buy this i just don't think even though the even though the texture's there and in terms of you know graininess and smoothness and you know fidelity yes it's very very close the dynamic range just isn't quite where it would need to be yeah it's a very familiar feel it doesn't feel like a different it feels like the same but just less less yep yeah i think is a fair way of putting it so i think again you know if if we were talking about a club sport wheelbase dd that was 10 to 15 newton meters that's interesting that would be very different but i don't think that this is a replacement for a dd1 or a dd2 no at least not unless you're drifting or doing something that just doesn't require that dynamic range in the first place yep yep yep yep cool cool so i guess to summarize things here i've said in quite a few recent direct drive review videos that i think the next advances in technology are really going to be in terms of making it more accessible so making it cheaper tick making it smaller tick and i do really love the footprint of this thing i love that it kind of sits nice and small on the rig it's not taking up a huge amount of space so you can see the screen behind sporty isn't it it's very sporty looking and you can get your screen up nice and close to it too which is really really cool that's something that i don't like about the dd1 dd2 and some of the simicu bases is that they are quite long so it limits the range and how close you can get your screen unless you're kind of dropping it in front or yeah well i've pumped mine in front there but then you can't get it low enough exactly yeah we really need a screen that has a notch in it yes somebody make that would be great um so yeah miniaturization as well and of course on the software side so i think really where we're seeing the most advances lately has been more just in the firmware and drivers and i think that's kind of been highlighted in the changes that we've seen with the dd1 and dd2 if you compare the experience now to what it was almost two years ago when they i think it is two years ago when they released those now right totally different and i think everybody agrees that's own one for any length of time so and again when you think back to what direct drive looked like i mean i think back to jimmy broadbent did a video about three years ago now saying you know it was about is direct drive worth it and he was looking at a osw wheel that had a control box that was the size of a pc and it was like using an entire power grid to run it and everything and that's what was required to get a direct drive experience three years ago so when you think between you know the outlay financially the cost of electricity the you know the footprint all those things the complexity is set up as well compare that experience to what we have here completely different and i think that's really kind of where things are going and where we're going to see the main advances over the next few years so i think really what this is is a massive wake-up call to the industry it's basically like fnatic throwing down and saying hey guys look what we can do yeah yeah and now it's up to everybody else to step up to the plate now i think really yeah i think so bringing that price points down as well would be well i mean the other really great thing about a product like this is it forces you know it forces the market to kind of refresh itself and go okay well do we really need to charge as much as we are for you know product xyz yeah so i guess the best way to summarize this is i have been quite vocal in my stance on dd hype as i call it in the past uh you know i i i frequently remind people that just because something is direct drive doesn't necessarily mean that it's better than everything else and so you know in saying that my expectations on this when i first heard about it weren't spectacularly high i kind of thought well you know at that price point it's probably not going to be as good as a sim magic m10 it's probably gonna have quite a few compromises in terms of the driving experience and you know it'll be one of those things that people buy just because it's dd not necessarily because it's good fanatic have done their best to you know raise my expectations and i've been talking to them quite a bit over the last few months about this product and you know they've been telling me how good it is and that's kind of you know pushed my expectations up you're a super critical guy though i am a pretty critical guy but what i'm happy to say is that at least in the case of this pre-production model that we have here in front of us right now it's absolutely meeting my expectations and exceeding them so i think that's yeah i'd say they're delivering on what they've said i think so so yeah i think that's pretty much all we can say at this point we obviously will be going into a lot more detail we'll take you through the software we'll pull the back cover off and have a look inside as well take you through the quick release once we get our hands on the final production model like a real review proper yeah exactly a proper review because i mean like there's a lot of stuff that we covered here and there's a lot of questions that we've hopefully answered in the best way we possibly can i think that we've you know hopefully covered all the things that people need to know at least to make a decision on pre-order uh now when it comes to pre-orders obviously there is a little bit of a different way that they're doing things this time so we'll put an article up on our website that'll keep you updated on what's happening there all the details as well as some links that you can use to help out the channel as well should you wish to do so we of course really do appreciate your support there because that's what keeps us running that's what makes all this possible so thank you guys so much for watching i really hope that this has answered your questions if you do want to know anything else let us know in the comments as well we'll do our best to answer you but do remember again that this is a pre-production model so we can't be absolutely certain in what we're saying we will of course come back later on with a full review once we have our hands on the production model so pretty exciting time to be a sim racer i think all right there's a lot happening there's a lot happening at the moment we've got the csl pedals coming up soon as well to check out we haven't even opened the box of those yet they came at the same time as this but um we wanted to get straight onto this to get the video out as quickly as we could so we'll get on to those next i think and uh yeah see what our impressions are of those that's i think that will do for today so see you guys later bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 190,447

Keywords: Fanatec CSL DD, Fanatec CSL DD Pre Order, Fanatec CSL DD preorder, Fanatec CSL DD pre-order, CSL DD vs Podium DD1, CSL DD vs Podium DD2, CSL DD vs DD1, CSL DD vs DD2, CSL DD vs ClubSport, CSL DD vs CSW2.5, CSL DD vs CSL Elite, Fanatec CSL DD Review, Fanatec CSL DD Driving Test, Cheapest Direct Drive wheel, Best value sim rig, sim racing rig, driving simulator, cheapest driving simulator, best value sim racing, boosted media, fanatec vs logitech, fanatec vs thrustmaster

Id: ml69TLbCExU

Length: 82min 2sec (4922 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Hobo_Healy]

"if it means you're going to be eating Vegemite sandwiches to afford it, is it still worth it?"

I feel personally attacked mate lmao. As someone with a keen eye on this coming from a CSL V1 though(the old electronics) I think it'll be a decent upgrade package wise and future proofing as long as the price comes in at a decent point.

[u/TheInfernalVortex]

Sounds like, as a CSW v2.5 owner... I may as well hold off and see what happens. But it's tough since if I can order it in teh first wave, I may be able to sell my csw v2.5 for a price that makes the CSL DD quite affordable.

[u/chiefawesome]

Very interesting review Will! Well done and good insights.

A question I would have is the following: I went from Thrustmaster TX to a ClubSport CSW 2.5 and both were very nice - but just not enough it terms of smoothness, fidelity and overall feeling.

I decided to go for a DD and ultimately decided on a DD1, which I now have sitting here (still in box as my cockpit hasn’t arrived yet). The reason was that you explained that a higher torque means way more dynamic range (with that nice graph you drew).

So, seeing as I had the money, I decided on the DD1.

However, watching your first look at the CSL DD, would you agree that I’m now basically shelling out more than double the price just for the strength of the feeling? (with the feeling and fidelity being the same between the two, as you said)

tl;dr: having the money for both, is the DD1 really worth the extra money?

[u/ErikWilliamson22]

Really curious to what their CSW DD will be like. The CSL DD defenitly isn't strong enough for what I would want for a direct drive but it has a nice compact size. The Podium wheelbase are still way to bulky for my taste, hope the CSW will be a good mixture of both.

[u/Samadroid]

Thanks for the thorough preview. So...if Fanatec asked you to delay pubblication a little bit to prepare on their end, we can assume preorders are very imminent, aren't they? :)

[u/Saneless]

Thank you for bringing up the Lite seat flex. I have the FGTL and wasn't sure if I should go 5 or 8, seems like 5 will be the better move.

And I love that I can change it later if I want to

[u/ears8]

thanks Will, you've cost me a fortune again with your review. Appreciated :D

[u/ears8]

also, does anyone know what are the exact dimensions of the baby DD? I cant find them, only packing dimensions.

[u/Gaadoooouchee]

As for a casual sim racer coming from a g920, what are going to be adjustments needed, and is it worth the jump?