REVIEW - Sigma Integrale DK2 Sim Racing Motion System

hey guys will here so today we're going to be checking out sigma integrale's dk2 full motion system for your simrix so this is available in a couple of different configurations we're going to be testing the four actuator version today so this system is 100 made and assembled in the usa and it's generated quite a bit of hype simply because on paper it looks very similar if not better than a lot of other motion systems on the market which cost a lot more money than this does so today we're going to be putting through its paces and seeing whether this is the motion system for your rig so let's check it out [Music] okay so first things first just to give you the full context of this review this has actually been a long time in the making we started chatting with sigma integrale back in february of 2021 in fact and we received this system back in july last year now when we received the system it was only compatible with iracing at the time and we kind of did a little bit of testing we decided that we'd hold off on doing a review until they developed their software further and their compatibility just because we wanted to make sure that you guys watching the video had the i guess full picture with this system now it is something that is continuing to evolve they're adding new titles all the time they're improving their software all the time but we feel like the product is at a point now where it's mature enough that we can give you a clear understanding of what you can expect from this product if you were to buy one kind of long term as well now obviously any review video is just a snapshot in time but obviously people watch these videos and you know if they see that it's only compatible with iracing then they might write the product off entirely so we have been testing this product for quite some time now since july last year so we don't have any sort of financial relationship with sigma integrale and this is just a loan unit that we're checking out today so there are a couple of different configurations available with the dk2 system they also do have a dk2 plus system which uses more powerful motors and gives you a little bit more aggressive feedback we might be checking that out a little bit further on down the line there's also a dk6 system available which uses the same motors as in the dk2 plus but gives you six inches of travel rather than the two inch which is available on the dk2 and the dk2 plus now the dk2 which we're looking at today is also available in two different configurations a four actuator system which is what we're going to be looking at today as well as a three actuator system which places one on the front and two on the rear and the three actuator system basically sacrifices a little bit in terms of performance but does save you quite a bit of coin so what we're talking about money the dk24 actuator system comes in at 514 us dollars obviously you need to factor in shipping on top of that as well depending on where you are in the world the three actuator version which we might do a separate video on later on down the track comes in at 3 900 us dollars so is quite a significant saving there and we're certainly not saying that that isn't a lot of money if we compare it to something like a d-box g3 4250i which is what i run on my daily driver rig that has an inch and a half of travel as compared to the two inches of travel that we have with this system and that comes in at around about nine and a half thousand us dollars depending on where you buy it from now there are often some deals and cashbacks available on those d-box systems so it definitely pays to do your research there but you're looking at a little bit more than half the price for a system like this as compared to the equivalent 4250i d-box system so it's going to be really interesting to get stuck into this today and see exactly what you're getting for the money so before we take a deeper dive into the harbour another important mention here is not only do they make pretty much everything hardware-wise in-house themselves but also develop the software entirely themselves too and that includes their motion control algorithm which they call velocity trap now one of the things that they've made a really big point to us about throughout this entire review process is the fact that they're not using any canned effects whatsoever everything is designed and based off the raw telemetry coming out of the sim and then they do all sorts of clever things with processing that raw data to create the effects that you feel through the seat of your pants in your rig so you can imagine if you're running over a ripple strip or something like that they might generate an effect for running over a ripple strip and then just play that effect whenever you hit a ripple strip for whatever duration you're on that ripple strip whereas here instead of just telling the system okay driver is on a ripple strip what it's doing is it's actually feeling the texture of the ripple strip feeling the contact patch of the tire the movement of the suspension all those little details that are buried in the telemetry data in the sim and using that raw data to generate what you're feeling and to give you an example one of the reasons that we've been holding off on doing this review is we were waiting for the engine vibration algorithm to become available that was just recently released as an update and that has made a massive difference to the overall experience in using this product so again telemetry based there and they've put a lot of effort into you know creating harmonics and really kind of creating that seat of the pants feeling that you get rather than just having a vibration that goes up and down with the rpm of the cast so we'll obviously explore that in a lot more detail when we get up and driving later on but just wanted to mention that up front as it is an important part of the design philosophy through the software manufacturing hardware and everything that you get here with the dk2 system so let's take a deeper dive into the hardware now so the system does comprise of quite a number of different components and cables and bits and pieces we're going to run through all of it now but look basically what it boils down to is you've got a control box which connects to your pc via ethernet and we'll talk about that in a moment then we have four or three depending on which system you go for actuators which are these guys you bought one of these to your rig in each corner now you do need to consider things like weight distribution and corner balancing we'll talk about that when we get up and driving a little later on too but basically what you get in the box is four of these brackets or three depending again on which system you buy you bolt those to the actuators the actuators then bolt to the sides of your rig you then have a couple of connectors on the top of the actuator here those are shielded molex connectors and they look like this so there's two different sets of cables that you get in the box you get a one meter length and a 2 meter length so you will end up having this box quite close to your rig you can imagine if you're running these cables all around from the four corners of your rig back to the box you are relatively limited in how far away you can put this so you're not going to be putting it off in a corner of the room or something like that but we've got one cable for power and one cable for data as i mentioned before those are shielded molex connectors nice and high quality there and they've got a decent amount of bend to them as well so if you look at the d-box system by comparison that has a single very very thick cable which runs to each of the actuators and that has a really shallow bend radius so it can be quite difficult to kind of move the cable around and feed it around the rig to a convenient position whereas these are relatively easy to move around so you've got two connections which plug in to the top of the actuator and then you guessed it the other side of those cables then plugs in to the front of the control box you've got one connector on the top one connector on the bottom and one position for each of the corners of the vehicle so one two three and four and if you do go for the three actuator system you do get the same control module meaning that you can upgrade with an additional actuator later on if you want to you just leave one of these slots free and the software will take care of the rest so looking at the actuator in more detail here the top portion here or the motor assembly that is made by american technic that's called a clear path motor and then everything from that point down the actuator itself is all designed and manufactured in house by sigma integrale themselves so the motor portion of the actuator and the power supply inside the control module which we'll look at in a moment both made by american technic and then everything else is made in-house by sigma integral so a few more details on these actuators you'll notice on the top here we do have a bit of a heat sink assembly here to increase the surface area and dissipate a little bit of heat from the control circuitry which sits on the top here and one thing we did notice is that these do get quite warm in operation not hot by any means but definitely warm to the touch you're not going to burn yourself or anything like that though so that's not a concern you can see inside this little flap here there is a little usb micro connection i believe that's going to be for flashing firmware or programming the circuitry on the motor itself but it's not something that is necessary to connect to for the user there's also a little status led in there as well to let you know what's going on with the motors and if we look at the rest of the actuator here we're spinning around to the front you can see the mounting surface basically just bolts directly onto 40 series profile so you bolt directly onto the sides of your rig and then we've got non-captive rubber feet here too so you can see a rubber pad on the bottom and then the actuator itself can actually float around inside that foot which means the rig can move around a little bit and not bind up and cause problems in that regard so there's a couple of different approaches to doing this kind of thing it is important to note though that the d-box system by default doesn't come with non-captive feet it comes with little teflon pads that you sit underneath the non-captive feet like what we have here as default are an additional option for the d-box system so it's good to see little details like that which are included by default rather than being an additional expense should you need it so the actuator housing and foot are both cnc machined with this kind of tumble finish here gives it a nice kind of industrial look i mean obviously that's going to be a subjective thing but i actually think it looks quite classy and quite yeah quite cool and the logo there cnc machined in as well now one of the important factors with these actuators is the 50 millimeter piston here having a thick piston like this with tight tolerances between the bore or the outer layer and the piston or the inner layer means that you've got high tolerance for side load as well so if you're needing to mount actuators in weird positions later on or you've got a little bit of sideways load on it for some reason you shouldn't have any increased issues with wear and tear and this bolt goes into a little channel which is machined out on the flat edge of the piston here the way this actually travels up and down is the motor on top is spinning and it can actually spin at 2500 rpm which is pretty impressive and then as that spins it raises and lowers the piston so you can imagine it's actually trying to rotate all the time and this kind of locks it in place now to ensure smooth operation as well you can see in the side here it's a little bit hard to see there's a teflon sleeve which actually wraps around the entire piston you can see where that's located just on those three holes there so what that essentially means is that there's very very little friction between the piston and the bore and that is of course going to minimize the noise of the piston sliding through the bore as well as minimize wear and tear over time so i think that's pretty much everything we need to cover in terms of the actuator so let's have a quick look at the control box now we'll open it up as well give you a look at the build quality internally too but look very simple in terms of its design inputs and outputs and everything we already had a look at the interface here for connecting to our actuators so we've got our power distribution along the top and our data distribution along the bottom now remembering as well that our control circuitry or motor drivers for the motors themselves connected to the actuators are actually housed in these assemblies on the top of each motor so i don't actually expect that there's going to be a whole lot going on inside this box when we open it up but we'll see so that is our interface along the front panel here we also have our ethernet connection here for connecting back to our pc now they do include a nice shielded ethernet cable inside the box as well you can see the shielding around the outside there so that keeps the emi to a minimum now whether or not it would be better to connect via usb to the pc for i guess ease of use is a bit debatable here having the ethernet connection back to the pc does make things a little bit more complex as you'll see when we look in the software in terms of the initial setup but once you've got that initial setup dialed in it is very simple and everything works very well now one of the issues with usb is that the longer the cable run the more signal degradation you get to the point where at some point it's just going to stop working you need things like powered extension cables to get a good quality connection whereas with an ethernet connection the cable length is almost unlimited now if you compare this to the d-box what they do is they have an ethernet connection from the master and slave boxes which are i guess the equivalent to this through to a little control module which then connects to your pc so you put the control module near your pc connect to the pc via usb and then run ethernet to the main control boxes for the rig itself now in my mind that is a slightly more convenient approach because it really does mean that it's purely plug and play you literally just plug the box directly into the pc and install the drivers you're good to go whereas with this one you do need to set a static ip address for your ethernet connection if you don't have a motherboard which has two ethernet ports on it you will need to buy a usb to ethernet adapter too they're not expensive you can pick them up off amazon for 15 20 bucks so it's not a big deal but it is something to just consider there if your motherboard doesn't have two ethernet ports which a lot of motherboards don't but flipping it around now to the back not a whole lot to see on the back here we've got a two inch cooling fan we'll have a look at that internally in just a minute and then we've got our iec power connection here and that is fused as you can see there's a little fused cartridge there and then a master power switch now interestingly this is a switch mode power supply so we've got 95 to 125 volt input and then 190 to 250 volts ac so pretty much anywhere in the world that i can think of at least you shouldn't have any issues you shouldn't need to run an inverter or any sort of power adapter to run this so let's pop the cover off now and have a quick look at what we have inside okay there we go all right yeah i thought there might be a connection in here because there were some screws on the back side so let's quickly unplug take a mental note of what it was plugged into so unplug these guys there we go one two just standard molex connections and you can see our power supply module sitting on the top plate there which we'll set aside we'll have a look at that in just a second and then a couple of things going on in here so as i suspected there's not a whole lot going on you can see a little bit of dirt and debris that's got sucked in by that cooling fan that we're looking at before nice quality cooling fan there actually there's a couple of cues that just absolutely scream quality so first of all it's a ball bearing type fan and you can even see on the top edge here they've actually used little rubber isolation feet to connect the fan to the housing so you're not getting that vibration transfer by using fixed screws from the fan so i mean just little things like that yeah it makes a big difference so let's have a quick run through what we have here in terms of circuitry so we've got our power input here a shielded fused iec connection and then that runs through to our power distribution circuit here that obviously connects through to our main power supply which we'll look at in just a second we do have a little power transformer on this board as well which is a mean well power transformer an irm 10-5 and that outputs 5 volts at 2 amps so i assume that that is responsible for providing the power through to our control circuitry down here so power distribution at the top obviously the power supply 2 and then we've got our control circuitry down the bottom here so we can see a couple of usb connectors on here usb micro a usb micro and a usb a connection in the back there obviously those aren't intended to be used by the user we've got a micro sd card in the slot there which is held in place with hot glue as well so obviously not something that's intended to be removed and basically we've got the brains on the top layer here and then control circuitry and distribution on the bottom layer so you can see it's stacked quite nicely here we've got little metal standoffs between with standoffs integrated into the housing itself and then that basically runs across here so not a whole lot of space being taken up by the control circuitry itself all this space behind here is all completely empty so there's plenty of airflow and if we set that guy aside and here we have our technic ipc or intelligent power center 5. so this is the other piece of the puzzle which isn't made by sigma integrale themselves but is still usa made so on the top surface here we've got that same kind of heat sink design that we saw on the motor control circuitry on each of the actuators and again very very solid construction here nothing at all to be concerned about in terms of quality at all let's just quickly have a look at some notes on this guys so this output 75 volts dc at 350 watt continuous or 500 watts fan cooled obviously we are fan cooled here or 900 watts peak so a pretty hefty little power supply there obviously with the ability to move 500 pounds at 8.4 inches per second it needs to be pretty hefty but that is everything that we have inside the power supply so let me get the clothes back on so i'm sure you guys will agree good build quality in terms of the control module only thing i guess i would nitpick here is the form factor so it is quite a big it is quite a big footprint uh 370 millimeters by 233 by 75 so it is quite big and as we mentioned before because we only have either one meter or two meter long cables included in the box you are by the time you cross those cables across your rig given that you've got a actuator in each of the four corners you're not going to end up having this more than about a half a meter away from your rig at best so i would like to see some sort of provision for mounting this enclosure as you can see it does have the little rubber feet on it but there's no provision made for mounting this in any way so it would be nice to be able to bolt it to the rig maybe on the underside underneath the seat i don't know whether maybe they've done this intentionally so that it's electrically isolated or maybe the vibration they might be concerned about although i didn't see any cause for concern internally nothing seemed to be you know at risk of shaking loose other than maybe the little micro sd card which was hot glued in place but maybe even having the option for something like a 2ru rack mounted enclosure something like that just to make it a little bit more easy to mount but otherwise very impressed so let's move on now into the software calibration and driving experience so we have the actuators mounted up on our track racer tr120 cockpit now a couple of quick things to note here in terms of spacing there's a whole bunch of documentation and best practices on the sigma integrale website so definitely check that out that'll certainly help you figure out what's going to be best for your particular rig a couple of quick points to note here though in the software you can see there is a configuration tool here where you input the spacing between front to rear and left to right or right to left and a couple of things to note with regards to the tr-120 cockpit that we have this mounted on specifically you can see it's a little narrower in the front than it is in the rear so what we've done is we've actually added some extra profile on the front to make that spacing the same so you can imagine if the rig was moving to the left for example and the actuators were slightly closer together on the front than what they are on the rear you get a little bit of dip in the front as well and obviously that's going to throw the software in how it's actually trying to do things a little bit out of whack as well so we don't have a we don't have an adjustment here for offset we just have the measurement from front to rear and left to right now best practice wise and again do check the website what you generally want to try and have is relatively even weight distribution from front to rear and as close to a perfect square as you possibly can as well that's going to mean that the range of movement available front to back is the same as from left to right as we've got it configured here we do have a little bit more movement from left to right in terms of how much it's going to sway the cockpit simply because we have a slightly larger distance from front to back than what we have from left to right but the software will compensate for that but any sort of compensation that you have to do there is going to restrict the movement in other areas so you can imagine we've got a range of movement available in the actuators if it's having to dial some of that movement out from some of the actuators to compensate for a non-perfect installation then it is going to restrict the movement ever so slightly so just one thing to be aware of there you can see here we've got a switch for three post or four posts so there is a free post which uses just a single actuator on the front now the other thing we noted earlier is that it is an ethernet connection back to your pc as well so if you don't have two ethernet ports would recommend you don't run your pc off wi-fi just to free up the network port for this generally speaking the experience with online gaming is better with a wired connection rather than wi-fi just because of packet loss jitter and things like that but that's something for another video so what we've done is we've actually connected the sigma integrale box back to the pc with a usb to ethernet dongle and that all worked fine all we needed to do here is just enter some static ip addresses as you can see here so we've got into the properties here for our usb to network adapter and we've just put in a static ip but all the instructions are there in the manual so we don't need to go into too much detail on that very simple to do and we didn't have any problems at all with getting things up and running so let's have a quick tour of the software now and take you through the basic configuration here so i'm going to start off by clicking on preferences what you can do is put your ip address of your pc on the lan into this field here and that will allow you to connect through this software via a web app which we'll look at in just a moment as well that allows you to make adjustments on your phone for example on the fly without having to alt tab out of your game which is a really cool feature something that i hope that we'll see on d-box before too long as well we've got fields here for port for web ui and grpc shouldn't need to worry about changing those and you can hit save there to make any changes that you make take effect and then we've got available ip addresses here you can see here this is just the local ip and our ethernet ip or the ip address of our pc on our local area network so you can see we've taken that ip and put it up in the top here so simple there so we'll click across two profiles now and you'll remember at the start of the video we mentioned how when this system was first sent to us was only compatible with iracing happy to report that since then we now have a wide variety of different games which this works with and they are adding new ones as well so check their website and their facebook page for the latest information there but you can see here we can select between ac acc automobile listed 2 dirt rally 2 f1 2021 iracing project cars 2 project cars 3 r factor 2 race room racing experience and x-plane is in beta 2. so they are starting to move into flight sim stuff as well which is very exciting so we can choose any one of those games we also have the ability to load and save profiles too so say for example you want to have multiple different custom profiles within a game for different cars for example you can do that you can save them you can send them to your friends to try out as well so it's just basically you hit save as it opens up a generic dialog box here and you can load and save in the same manner here you can see down on the bottom left here we have a couple of status boxes here you can see that the software is running and web ui is running if we click on the little qr code here you can see it pops up with a qr code that we can scan to access this directly on our phone as we mentioned before as well and then on the right hand side here this is all about configuration and fine tuning adjustment for the motion itself so pretty basic not a whole lot of stuff to do here but it does cover all of the essential stuff so you can see we've got gas brake pitch which is the pitch of the rig forward to back as we accelerate or as we break and we've got adjustments here for intensity from zero all the way through to ten then we've got an adjustment here from zero to ten for smoothing for each of these as well so gas and breaking if you hover over each of these it does pop up with a nice little tool tip which will let you know what it does so let's just quickly run through each of these fields and we'll do a bit of a live tuning session and see what kind of changes i make from the default settings as we look at them now so gas and brake it says surge is very responsive and highlights the driver's pedal inputs surge also indicates pitch naturally and this layer replicates the responsiveness of search by converting to responsive pitch movements as you increase this consider reducing the environment layer intensity so often when we talk about surge we're talking about forward to back movement in terms of an additional axis that the rig can actually slide forward and back on what this is doing is essentially replicating the same kind of sensation in your body but by tilting the rig forward and back so in the absence of true surge this works quite well this is definitely something that you would dial down if you did have surge built into your rig though so then turning roll or sway sway is very responsive and highlights the driver's steering input sway also induces roll naturally and this layer replicates the responsiveness of sway by converting to responsive roll movements as you increase this consider reducing the environment layer intensity so what this is going to do is make the rig pitch to the left as we turn to the right and vice versa obviously replicating body roll of the vehicle if we move down to heave this is our up and down movement so this layer captures the low frequency up and down movement up to 10 hertz example after a bump suspension setting occurs at approximately two hertz so this gives you the sensation of going over bumps kind of rises and dips in the road things like that and that is something that obviously you can't get with a seat mover style rig which only moves in pitch and roll and for me heave really kind of adds that sensation of really being inside a car you know feeling in your stomach when you go over bumps and things like that so definitely one that we'll want to spend some time fine-tuning then we've got the environment adjustment here so this layer captures the true pitch and role of the game vehicle so think of the game vehicle's chassis as a two-dimensional plane this layer replicates in real-time that plane's orientation in 3d space with scaling up to 100 of reality so you can imagine rather than it replicating the movement of the suspension relative to the ground what this is doing is it's replicating the actual movement of the vehicle so if you're parked on an incline or parked on a slight curb or something like that it's actually going to tilt the entire rig to compensate for that relative movement between the environment and the vehicle itself so that's what that is so we've got road vibration pretty self-explanatory but it says this layer captures the high frequency up and down movement 10 hertz to 60 hertz with independent signal for each corner so that's obviously important that means that we are able to replicate vibration from tire to road contact in each four corners of the rig obviously dependent on the telemetry data coming out of the sim that you're playing but most do allow for that telemetry now so this should work quite well for example rumble strips inducing a 60hz vibration with a bias to the driver's side this layer is optimal when the game telemetry is above 300hz so it should work quite well in a set of course of competition for example which is the first game that we're going to test out here and the one that i'm going to take you through for all of our live tuning session so then lastly we have engine vibration with an adjustment here for intensity as well as distribution from front to rear so obviously 80 20 means 80 in the front 20 in the rear and then you can slide that all the way through to whatever you want so what it says here under the little tool tip this layer captures the high frequency vibrations of the engine obviously it will produce two high frequency vibrations for any given engine speed so it kind of creates a harmonic kind of i guess resonance here and i know that they put a lot of effort into this to sort of really try and make it feel genuine rather than just matching the frequency in the actuators to the rpm for example so it's definitely something that i'm looking forward to experiencing and that is basically it so what we're going to do now is hit power on that should activate the actuators you should see me rising up on the screen now so i'm going to hit that and the rig will raise up there we go so it doesn't feel just with the movement like that doesn't feel quite as smooth as the d-box 4250i does uh that is it almost feels like a hydraulic system kind of lifting you up whereas you could really kind of feel the vibrations slightly as that moved up and down so it's going to be interesting to see whether we get that same kind of robotic feel when we're driving in just a moment or not but definitely a thing that i noticed different immediately there when we got up and running but that is all up and running now we've got a set of course of competition profile running so let's head out on the track now for a bit of a live tuning session i'll get my phone up and running here as well so we can make changes on the fly on our phone then we'll test it out in a range of different sim titles as well give a set of course eye racing dirt rally 2 and maybe automobilista 2 a bit of a try as well and then we'll wrap it all up with our conclusions okay so we're going to start off with mount panorama circuit in a set of corsair competition lots of undulation here lots of aggressive curves we've got some crests that should get off that pit of our stomach kind of feeling as we go along the straights as well so lots of things here to digest we've got the mobile phone app here i shouldn't really call it an app because basically what it is is it's just a web page that you can access through your phone but it all works really nicely we'll bring this up on your screen as well we can see our live tuning as we make adjustments here so we're just going to be starting off with the default settings as they come in the game's profile and then we'll fine-tune from there so let's head out onto track now whoa okay yep we're active it's working all right let's start off by feeling the engine vibration a little bit before we head out so really nice kind of resonance going through the rig now does feel quite genuine if anything maybe a little bit too over the top for this kind of car in real life but we'll see how it feels when everything else is going on we can definitely turn it down if we need to i think what do we have it we had it set to 40 intensity at the moment so we could turn it down quite a bit from there if we wish to do so but we'll start off with default but as i rev that up it does have a really nice authentic kind of feeling to it so it doesn't just feel this is kind of what i was describing before what i was hoping for it doesn't just feel like the um like the vibration is just purely replicating the frequency going up and down there's definitely a lot more to it than that and i can feel yeah it really has a nice resonance to it let's rev it all the way up as well now one thing that i've noticed with the d-box system is that when you rev the engine up you hear the actuators go in proportion whereas this you hear a little bit but it kind of tops out at around about 3000 and then it kind of just does other things from there so it does feel different but you don't hear it quite so audibly so let's head out here already feeling slight rippling around now when it comes to motion less is often more to an extent so we'll see what their default settings like all that gear change feels nice really kind of gives you that jerk as you oh wow the road textures feel really good as well going over the first crest here bit of the stomach nice [Music] so you'll hear my voice kind of jerking around a little bit like i'm on a roller coaster and that is authentically how strong the rig is so it is moving me around that much that it's making my voice shake so it's going to take it nice and easy while i kind of get a sense for everything that's going on here [Music] come up over the top of the hill but in its default configuration it does actually feel very good i probably would turn down the side to side movement at least just a little bit [Music] you kind of want to have your motion so at least in my opinion and everybody's going to have their own take on this but in my opinion you kind of want to have your motion set so that you get a sensation of what the car is doing but you don't want it to be throwing you around all over the place to the point where it makes it actually more difficult to drive so it's one of the benefits that we have with simulation is you can kind of tweak things and fine-tune them to make you as fast as possible whereas in the real world you kind of just have to deal with the hand that you dealt in terms of movement and bouncing around and i mean formula one purposing is a perfect example of this you see how much they're moving around in the cabin obviously if they were able to dial that out and not have that movement they would so if you want to you know if your aim is to be as fast as possible you can imagine if your rig is creating that purposing it's actually going to slow you down so just an example there you can see just going down the straight here how much movement there is how much sensation wow they really have done a very good job here now a couple of other little observations that i have as well just driving around up on the curb right the curb sensation feels really good as well and i will elaborate on some of these sensations more than just saying feels good in just a moment once i got my head around it but it is a little more noisy than the d-box system you kind of get this rattling sound within the actuators themselves i'm not sure exactly what that is must be something inherent in the design but i noticed that when the actuators were winding up and winding down we'll probably we'll show you a clip of that in the conclusions i think just to give you a real sensation of how loud it is it's not going to be the loudest thing on your rig for most people i would say but if you don't use headphones you will definitely hear it so no actually i take that back on this rig it is the loudest thing that i can hear but it's okay i mean obviously it's going to depend on the rig that you have we are running the houstonvale ultimate plus pedals here which are very very quiet pedals but you do kind of get that rattling sound through the actuators and we have gone over the entire rig to check that nothing's worked its way loose or anything like that as well so that is all fine but yeah look in terms of the default settings it does feel very very good i think there's a couple of things that i want to try and smooth out a little bit remember we do have those smoothing settings set to zero so let's just get down onto conrod straight again and i'll make a couple of tweaks [Music] but yeah very genuine if you've never driven a full motion cockpit before it really does give you a lot of additional sensation over what you get with something like a seat mover just that ability to have heave so that movement bouncing up and down over bumps really adds a lot to the immersion now i don't think the motion system is going to make you faster overall in most cases but definitely when it comes to immersion it adds a lot so let me wake up my phone now quickly so you can see here basically all the settings that we had before replicated on the screen without any of the other clutter which isn't important in the context of what we're doing so what i'm going to do to begin with is add a little bit of smoothing actually we'll add a lot of smoothing to begin with and then we can wind it down because i don't have any idea kind of how much difference this is going to make as a starting point so i'm going to decrease my turning roll a little bit as well i felt that was a little bit too much and i'm going to wind that up to 5 as well just see how smooth this makes everything feel heave i was pretty happy with but i might wind that down one click for now and again set my smoothing to 5 environment so the relationship between the vehicle itself and the and the 3d environment we're going to leave that on five increase our smoothing road vibrations i was happy with engine vibrations i felt could maybe be a little bit less so i'm going to set that to 30 and i'm going to set the distribution here to 50 50 as well see what kind of difference that makes now it doesn't look like we've got a save button so all those changes should just take place immediately i'll set the phone back down and let's see what it feels like now so definitely straight away i can feel that engine vibration is a little bit less than what it was before in fact i think that's probably a little bit too low so i'm going to bump that back up to 40 again i am feeling it more in the seat of my pants now that it's not distributed to the front so i'm actually going to wind that all the way up and see how intense it is yeah okay so it's not it's not hugely more intense winding it up to 100 it's not like rattling me all over the place i'm going to crank that down to 70-ish yeah we'll go 70 for now there we go yeah with 50 50 distribution i think 70 feels pretty good i definitely get that sensation in the seat of my pants it probably is a little bit more exaggerated than what it would be in real life but it feels nice and uh yeah i think it's good so let's leave that there and let's go for a bit of a drive again what i'm interested to see here is whether the engine vibration sort of dulls out some of the other effects so when it comes to audio systems which this works kind of in a sense similar to when you're sending a lot of low frequency signals through a speaker and then trying to use that same cone to replicate high frequency sounds what happens is the high frequency sounds end up getting sort of muddied out by the displacement of the lower frequencies and the amount of you know the amount of volume the amount of movement in the cone that's necessary to create higher sound pressure levels at lower frequencies so i'm interested to see whether having that constant vibration with the engine dulls things out now everything does feel a little bit more dull now than it did before and that's purely just because of the amount of smoothing that i'm running i think it feels probably a little bit too fluid now i would say but let's go down the straight again and just feel how it feels over those bumps so yeah the bumps just don't quite have the intensity it feels more like i'm on a on a ride rather than in a racing car now i think [Music] still kind of get the pit of the stomach feeling there [Music] still feel pretty good yeah that felt good [Music] so i'd say if i were focused more on competitiveness and less on immersion i probably want the setting something more like this it's not rattling me around in my seat so much it's not really throwing me around so it's not sort of breaking my gaze so to speak but it definitely doesn't feel quite as authentic as it did with the default settings remembering again that that intensity level was only at about sort of 50 of what's possible with this rig whoa mr brakes all right let's stop again here quickly and do a couple more adjustments as i get thrown around over the bumps there so i'm going to i'm going to turn down the smoothing on my turning roll turn down the smoothing on my heave to three environment i'm going to set to 4 i think and maybe i'm going to crank up the intensity one notch on the environment too road vibrations i might actually try increasing that just one notch as well see how that feels i'm going to i am going to wind my engine vibration down just a touch because i did feel like it was a little bit overpowering compared to some of the other effects and then gas break pitch i'm going to i'm going to turn that smoothing down to 2 as well just see if it makes it feel a little bit more i guess energetic rather than so uh so dulled out and smooth so let's get underway again i really love the ability to just make those fine tuning adjustments on the fly without having to alt tab out yeah okay that feels a lot more authentic now let's go [Music] and what i would say is like i was concerned when um when we first powered up the rig and i kind of i felt the texture in the rise and fall compared to the d-box i was a little bit concerned that the movement might feel quite robotic with this system but [Music] it doesn't seem to be the case at least in terms of the sensation that i'm feeling i mean you guys can see for yourselves in the footage of the movement whether it looks like it's kind of jerking around at all but it feels very fluid and smooth to me it doesn't doesn't feel robotic really at all which is quite quite quite an impressive achievement i would say when you consider all the things that are going on here and the other thing that i'm not noticing which is an amazing thing is latency of any sort whatsoever now they go they go into quite a bit of detail on latency on their website there's an entire page which is dedicated to the response time of each individual component in the system so the software the individual actuators the processing that happens onboard the actuators themselves the box that processes everything through the network adapters everything so they've obviously spent a lot of time really trying to optimize things there and that really shows now i haven't noticed latency being an issue on the d-box system at all either so it's certainly not i wouldn't say it's a point of advantage over that system being the only other system that i've ever tested but definitely no issues whatsoever when it comes to latency or lag or anything like that everything feels very much real time to me at least as far as my senses are concerned other people may be able to determine a little bit of lag there obviously there is a little bit of lag there because the numbers tell you so but not enough that i'm feeling it and i know that is one of the things that people have complained about with the uh sfx 1000 or sfx 100 system the diy kits not only just in a bit of like input lag but also just in the response time of the actuators themselves and how quickly they respond to fast movement obviously you know be out to be able to replicate sharp bumps in the road the actuators need to be able to go up and down very very quickly and i believe that the uh the motors in these actuators are running at over 2000 rpm which goes to show you know just how quickly they have to be able to move but this feels absolutely incredible now i'm really happy with the way this feels [Music] one thing i would like to see in the software is an overall intensity adjustment so once you have everything dialed in relative to each other having one slider that allows you to scale up or scale down the overall intensity of all the effects that's one thing that i do find i use quite often in um in the d-box software just to allow me to wind things down for particular cars obviously some cars are going to have more movement in the suspension than others and that does make a difference so i would like to see them add that just so you don't have to go through and kind of wind down every single slider to get to the level that you want when you're changing between different cars but obviously you can save different profiles if you wish to do so but what i'm going to do now is spend a bit of time driving here do a little bit more fine-tuning let you know kind of where i land and then we're going to try out some other sims as well see how the experience translates across in those and then wrap everything up with our conclusions [Music] so i spent a little bit more time fine-tuning in a set of course of competition just to get the most out of the system for what i like and look motion is a very subjective thing some people are going to prefer certain effects over others what i sort of try to aim for in my experience over the last nine months using a d-box system is to try and sort of i guess get things that it will enhance the driving experience things that give me cues as to what's going on with the car make me feel a little bit more in control and a little bit more connected to the car than i do with just a steering wheel and pedals being that the steering wheel is usually the only thing that you can actually feel any sensation of what's going on with the car and the rest of it is all just down to visual cues what i find is if you crank the motion up too much or you just have too many things going on it can overwhelm your senses and actually ends up detracting away from consistency and lap times rather than necessarily enhancing the experience so it's a fine balance between whether you want to aim to go fast and consistent or whether you want to have the maximum amount of immersion so for me it's very much a case of less is more and i rely more on the kind of haptic feedback than the physical movement itself so having spent a lot of time experimenting that is where i've landed and it'd be really great to hear from you guys in the comments who have motion systems whether you take a similar approach or whether you do something different but in a set of course of competition the thing that really jumped out to me was how good the curbs feel in particular really got a strong sensation of the car kind of coming up on the curbs the texture of the ripple strips themselves and even things like bumping over sausage curves really gave a good sensation of what you're feeling in the vehicle an important thing to point out i think is that with a motion system the aim should always be again in my opinion to replicate what you're feeling in the seat of a car rather than actually replicating the movement of the car itself so you're not trying to replicate the body roll and everything that goes on with the body relative to the relative to the environment it's more just about trying to get that sensation of the seat of the pants feeling and what i found is that i was deeply immersed in the experience and yeah it gave me everything that i needed to feel to sort of know what was going on with the car while it doesn't necessarily make me any faster than i was before definitely added to that immersion and made the whole experience a lot more enjoyable things like going over crests and bumps and the sensation that you get in the pit of your stomach when you go through a rouge for example very well replicated in the sim and it really did give a good sense of i guess a three-dimensional environment that you're traveling through inside the game rather than just sort of being connected to a wheel and only feeling what the car is doing so it definitely adds a lot to the experience in acc and next i moved on to eye racing and i was very happy to find that the experience was quite consistent with what we'd had with acc previously so there was nothing that was obviously lacking the definition in the kerbs and running up on the ripple strips was maybe a little bit less defined we did have to fine tune and tweak the settings a little bit just to kind of amplify those things but i think that's just down to differences in the telemetry data rather than anything that's lacking in the sigma integrale software i was excited to jump into dirt rally 2 and see what dirt textures felt like there and while it wasn't as defined as i perhaps hoped for i think that's just down to again the telemetry dial that's actually coming out of dirt rally itself it felt very similar to what we have on the d-box and it's just it just doesn't have that really sort of granular texture that you get in some of the more hardcore sim titles like acc and eye racing but still gave a good overall experience definitely gave you a strong sensation when you went off the main track and onto the sides going through grass and stones and things like that all felt good and again the body roll and sensations that you actually get through the body of the car into the seat of the pants is definitely enough to immerse you in the three-dimensional world and really sort of add to that overall driving experience i tested out aceto corsa as well as automobilista 2 and both of them were pretty consistent with the overall experience as well a couple of standout things i really loved the sensation driving the v8 supercar and automobilista 2 particularly around mount panorama when you go over those bumps as i was describing in the live tuning session in acc with the softer suspension that you have in the v8 supercar compared to things like gt3 cars you really get a sensation of the car kind of rising up over the crest of the hill and then bouncing down you could really kind of feel the rear suspension moving around and just the body roll sensation as well was very very authentic really gave a good sensation of what kind of movement was going on in the car itself i said of course it was a lot of fun in the porsche 962 as well we've got a couple of decent power slides going around spa and while you don't get the same sensation of traction loss like what you get with a dedicated traction loss system with sway or your what you do get is still a good sensation of the body roll on the car kind of kicking to the side in each direction as you kind of counter steer and move around and again it does definitely add to the driving experience although it won't necessarily make you any faster than you were without motion and that was a driving experience overall very consistent across all the different titles i was very happy to see that the software did detect when you change sims as well so while there was a little bit of configuration that was needed for some of the titles did have to go into an xml file make some changes for dirt rally 2 for example for the most part it was pretty much a plug and play experience and we didn't run into any problems at all that weren't covered easily with documentation already in place on the sigma integrale website now motion compensation is of course a factor when it comes to using screens whether it's a single screen or triple screens as well now our preference having tried out a bunch of different screen sizes and motion systems is that vr or screens that are actually fixed to your rig so moving in unison with the rig do tend to work best but ultimately it's going to boil down to how much your perspective sitting inside the rig is moving relative to those screens now there are some motion systems that are starting to hit the market now which do have inbuilt motion compensation to allow the screen perspective to actually move in unison with the cockpit even though the screens are fixed to the ground it's going to be really interesting to test those systems out in my experience and tom's experience we haven't found that to be overly necessary at the motion levels that we run ultimately if your perspective relative to the dashboard inside the car is bouncing all over the place it is going to make it harder to drive and that of course goes for any motion system not just the dk2 so as the first motion system that you spent any significant time with how do you feel about the dk2 oh it's been so much fun having it on the system it's it's a very very enjoyable experience having it on and right i guess my my first concern before installing it was that it might be really hard to install and hard to fine tune and get it going well but it just wasn't the experience at all it was it was so easy as easy as you know any other sort of you know general peripheral installation yeah i think it's one of those things that kind of it it seems really complex it seems like it might be hard to sort of get the software set up and you know there there isn't a whole lot of fine-tuning sliders and things that are available with this which is kind of good yeah it does make it a little bit more accessible i think yeah but what i found and i mean let us know what your experience was like but it didn't really take me a whole lot of time to sort of fine tune and sort of i guess come to grips with what i was doing and no and i definitely didn't feel like i was missing out on any you know changeable parameters or anything like that yeah i didn't feel like i needed to change more than i could yeah so what they have there in the software is what you need and yeah it's easy to use and it's it works well it's good yeah and the mobile yeah i'm calling it an app it's not an app it's a page that's accessible within your local area network so you're putting your ip address on whatever device you want and it just yeah and i had my phone on a mount on the cockpit itself so i could literally while i was driving just reach over and yeah it changes like things are really really good yeah little little details like that definitely make a big difference and i feel like they've really you know taken their time to really die i did i did have one major problem though yeah my sim is on the top level of of my house yeah and my son's bedroom is right underneath it yeah and this thing on the top story made the house rattle something savage yeah look we're all the places that i've run our motion system myself have all been on a slab on the bottom floor so i haven't had that experience yeah it's fine running it here in the studio it's it's not particularly noisy yeah look i don't know if i agree with that it's definitely a lot more noisy than the d-box system is by comparison it's got that kind of rattle in the actuators that you can hear even with headphones on yeah if you have the volume cranked up to you know the normal kinds of levels that i play at it wasn't a problem but it's definitely more noisy than the d-box system is the d-box system obviously when you're doing things like engine vibration you do get that vibration transferred through the floor and you know if you're not on a solid floor it is going to vibrate and even with d-box system if i'm playing that in one room and you know my wife's in another room she's kind of hear it and she's gonna be like what's that noise so yeah it's definitely something that you need to consider if you're you know playing with other people in the house or whatever even if you turn the motion levels down if you are using that kind of high frequency tactile vibration type of feedback you're definitely going to get that resonating through the house yeah and look it just wasn't plausible to run this system on the top story with kids sleeping yeah anywhere in the house i think you'd find that it would be the same with any actuator absolutely absolutely yeah so it's certainly not a complaint about this system specifically definitely but it is important to note that this is more noisy than the d-box 4250i system which is what i run on my system every day and i don't know whether that's something that's just it seems to be inherent to the design of the actuators themselves you can hear this kind of rattling and clicking noise in the top of the actuators as they spin and um yeah it was the same across all four actuators so it doesn't appear to be an issue with any particular one and yeah it did seem to be pretty consistent there what we can do is we can actually show you an example of that right now so i guess the big question that a lot of people are going to have is how does a system like this compare to some of the other options that are available on the market we can only talk about ones that we've personally tested so i'm going to compare it directly to the d-box 4250i now straight off the bat here i've got a little bit of pricing in front of me in u.s dollars given that dk2 system is a usa made product uh the four actuator version as what we tested today comes in at 5145 us dollars there is the option for a three actuator based system as well which puts one at the front and two at the rear that comes in quite a bit cheaper at 900 us dollars we haven't tested that configuration yet so i'm not going to comment on that in today's video but if you compare that to the dbox 4250i system that i have on my daily driver rig that system if you buy it from sim lab where we got our one from comes in at equivalent 9540 us dollars now there are deals available there i know simlab we're offering i don't know if they're still offering a cashback on a p1x system so if you buy it with the p1x you get the p1x for free or if you've already bought a p1x system they give you a cashback for that rig so it is going to end up being a little bit cheaper than that in most cases but the prices that stated on their website equates to 9540 us dollars compared with 5145 dollars for the dk2 system so that is not an insignificant amount of money big amount of money to put it in perspective that's enough money to buy a car yeah you could buy a car in sim racing terms there's enough money to buy a very high-end wheelbase a nice wheel and a decent set of pedals as well so it's it's definitely a huge difference and i honestly other than the noise levels i was honestly surprised at how close this came to the d-box system in terms of the experience i did definitely notice when we were going through calibration cycles and starting and stopping the system that when the when the d-box system goes up and down in a linear fashion it's definitely a lot smoother i think i mentioned in the review that it feels almost hydraulic when it goes up and down whereas this feels a lot more kind of mechanical but when you're actually driving it didn't feel it yeah i agree i mean i find the d-box feels very clinical yeah whereas this sounds very feels very mechanical and it's almost got an authenticity about it that yeah i don't quite get from the d-box granted the d-box settings that i've used in all your settings how you like it not how i've personally tuned it yeah i have the d-box wound down quite a bit for you know our point of view videos and stuff so obviously it does have a lot more movement thinking back to when we were first thinking up and experimenting with it i i find that maybe it didn't quite have some of the sharpness in in the response that this has i think that a lot of the a lot of a lot of the effects that you're getting through like ripple strips and things like that in the d-box system are more like effect based rather than telemetry based yeah and obviously sigma integral i've spent a lot of time really dialing in and getting those settings right and i mean even just through the discussions that we've had with them in the last 10 months or so since we've had this system you know we've had a lot of discussions with them around the development of the effects and what they're doing there and you know hey guys this is coming soon this is coming soon like you know so obviously they're spending a lot of time getting it right they're not releasing stuff until they're really satisfied yeah and it's also important to note as well that this is a system that has been developed specifically for sim racing whereas d-box isn't focused primarily on sim racing they make all sorts of systems of cinema and stuff like that so you know they're a very passionate group of people definitely conversations we've been having they just love what they're doing which is so definitely so another thing that i was really interested to see is the build quality of this compared to the far more expensive d-box system as well and you know while there are a couple of obvious things that you know aren't quite built to the same level as with the d-box system you've got the big thick cables that are integrated with all that shielding on the d-box for example but i felt like this certainly wasn't poor quality by comparison i felt like everything you needed was kind of there we didn't have any problems with interference or anything like that um you know the quality of the connections is all fine and yeah there was no issues whatsoever everything's nice and sturdy and solid and yeah no i've had no issues with any overheating or anything working loose over time you did step on the heatsink oh one of these these right into my foot yeah that was horrible don't don't step on the top of the actuators it's not a good time shoes kids yeah but yeah absolutely no issues at all with the build quality as far as i'm concerned from the internals on the box to the cabling the actuators themselves power supplies all that stuff no issues the software quality is fine as well there's no issues there it just there doesn't appear to be any corners cut anywhere with this and i mean it is an expensive system 5000 us dollars is a lot of money so you wouldn't expect any cheap quality but when you compare it to the d-box system yeah you know it stacks up which which i wasn't sure would be the case so yeah so overall i really can't see any reason not to recommend this system i think it's a really great system obviously they're very committed to the future of it as well releasing software updates regularly improving things regularly and like you said before they're a really passionate team of people that are obviously committed to the future of their brand and yeah they have a discord server where they're they're quite active in there if anyone has questions and things like that they can jump on there and ask them directly they've been really good so yeah awesome awesome so yeah that is basically all we can say at this point i'm very happy with it i think that you know obviously it's a lot of money to spend on your rig it's not going to make you faster or more consistent i don't think so much fun it really is so much fun it adds a lot to the immersion and yeah i mean some people will say that it made them faster some people will say motion doesn't make them faster some people will say that motion takes away from the experience overall because it's not authentic and there's all sorts of different schools of thought on this but at the end of the day it's a ton of fun and i think that's the main reason why most people are looking at a system like this they want to have fun they want to add that next level of immersion to their system and this absolutely achieves that in my opinion yeah agreed 100 so that's it guys i really hope that that's it guys i really hope that the review has helped you guys out if it has leave a thumbs up make sure you sub to the channel as well so you don't miss future videos and we will see you again soon bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 54,454

Keywords: Sigma Integrale, DK2 motion, DK2+, Sigma Motion System, Simlab, D-Box, DBOX, Full motion rig, Full motion, 3DOF, heave, pitch, roll, YawVR, Motion rig, sim racing, Boosted MEdia, Assetto Corsa, iRacing, F1, Next LEvel Racing, Traction Loss, Budget DBox

Id: Po7uwi-VQt0

Length: 56min 57sec (3417 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2022