REVIEW - Simagic Alpha Direct Drive Sim Racing Wheel Base

hey guys will here so welcome to our review of the sim magic alpha direct drive wheelbase this is a 15 meter wheelbase that competes pretty much directly with the fnatic dd1 and simicube 2 sport so let's jump in today and see how it does so let's quickly go through what we get inside the box now i'm not going to do a full unboxing for you guys because you know the packaging is kind of unremarkable and i want to try and keep this as short and sweet as i can but i will just quickly show you the box now and you can see there's plenty of insulation there so yeah i mean it's all very high quality packaging no issues there whatsoever but we just don't really need to go through a full unboxing i don't think but let's go through the accessories that we get now starting with the power cable now this is the same power cable that we saw with the sim magic m10 in our previous reviews and it does have this little rocker switch on here which serves as an emergency switch should you wish to use it in that fashion now unlike with the m10 there is an emergency stop switch which you can purchase separately which plugs directly into the base in addition to our power cable too so you do have that option should you wish to do it and that was one of the nitpicks that i had about the sim magic m10 previously so i'm glad that not only do we have this switch now we also have the option of an emergency cut off switch which we can mount on our rig directly so that's really good we've got our power brick here as well which is quite large i'll flash the measurements up on the screen for you guys it's not a brand name power supply like what we get with other wheel bases within the same price range so we'll see how this performs we'll see whether it gets hot it looks to be completely passively cooled i'm not going to open this guy up for you because i think it is plastic welded and i don't want to break it opening it up but it's a 120 to 240 volt switch mode power supply so regardless of what country you live in as long as you've got the correct iec cable or power cable you can plug that in and it will work there is also a power switch on here as well so we've got multiple points of power cut off should we need it we've got this one and obviously the power cable we looked at earlier and it says here as well output is 36 volts at 10 amps just in case you're wondering about that now we have the same connection that we saw on the sim magic m10 as well it's kind of like this ps2 style looking connector there with four pins internally so you can see one two three four so two positive and two negative which i assume is two separate power rails coming out of the power supply we've got a ziploc bag here with some m6 bolts for mounting as well as an allen key and we'll talk about mounting in more detail in just a moment once we get onto the wheelbase itself because there are a few different mounting options available with this guy we've got a repair card here as well it's not an instruction manual it's just a warranty card if we can open that up and it's got our manufacture date and a few other little bits and pieces of detail in there as well then we have another bag here with two usb a to b connections in it these are two meters long each now i don't know why there's two supplied because the wheelbase itself only actually has a single usb a to b connection to the pc so yeah not sure what the story is with that but we'll if we do figure that out we'll let you guys know later on may just be as a spare but again these are nice high quality cables they're all shielded as well you can see there is a little ferrite choke on there too so that's good and that is everything that you get inside the package so nice and simple nothing really there that doesn't need to be there and yeah as i said before all very well packaged so i don't imagine you would have any problems with things arriving damaged now we're going to be testing today with the round leather gt1 wheel as well as the gt4 wheel there are a couple of different configurations available between alcantara and leather as well as d shape and round shape and different resellers will also sell this base with different packages of wheels for discounted prices depending on who you buy from as well we're going to talk about distribution in just a moment because that is a really important point to cover in detail with sim magic but as these wheels do interface wirelessly with the base itself it is an important part of the story too so we will be having a look at these wheels and whether we would recommend them because obviously if you're going to be buying a sim magic wheelbase although you can use other wheels with it most likely you're going to be using their own wheel so we will have a look at those in details today too but let's go into more detail now on the base itself so i'm sure a lot of you have already noticed the similarities between the alpha and the simicube 2 sport and pro now unfortunately i don't have those two models here in the studio at the moment to compare directly but what i do have is a dd2 a sim magic m10 and of course a vrs direct force pro which uses a small midge motor that we see in a few other direct drive wheelbases too so just to compare the alpha against the semi coupe 2 sport in terms of measurements the semi q2 sport is 130 millimeters tall and wide and 250 millimeters long now give or take a little bit for the size of the quick release which will obviously depend on the quick release you're using with the simicube 2 about the same length as the alpha width and height wires this is 20 millimeters less at 110 millimeters tall and wide now i actually really do like the form factor of this i mean i know it does look like a bit of a copy of the simicube 2s and there's no way around that but i do like the fact that it's really nice and small it kind of hides away and it disappears behind your wheel which is really cool being nice and short as well means that you can mount your monitor really closely behind it and we also do of course have the connections coming out the sides as well which means we can get the monitor even closer compare that with the simicube 2s they have the connections coming out of the back which means you do have to allow for that extra little bit of distance between the back of the unit and your screen as well so that is a nice little design feature that i think will appeal to a lot of people being able to run the cables out the sides so they don't interfere with your screen but otherwise very very similar to the sport and the pro in terms of the design now comparing against the dd1 and the dd2 obviously you can see here it has a much smaller footprint lengthwise it's really going to come down again to the wheel using in the quick release that you're using so it's a little bit hard to compare directly here but overall it's going to end up being somewhere between about 5 and 10 centimeters shorter than the dd1 or dd2 once you have it mounted up and again with the dd1 and dd2 you do have those connections coming out of the back so you do have to account for that as well if you're going to be mounting your screen directly behind so i do think that this is something that's important to consider if you are going to be mounting your screen directly behind you want to have it as close to you as you possibly can or if you're wanting to have the screen on top and wanting to have it as low as possible too obviously having this being so short the distance between where your wheel is going to be sitting and where your monitor is going to be able to sit on top of it is going to be less as well so something that's worth considering there but otherwise very similar physical design to the simicube 2 sport and pro now the comparison with the m10 is actually quite interesting because the motor inside this and we showed you this when we did our review of the m10 a couple of months back the motor inside this is actually quite a lot smaller than the alpha is but because of the design of this with all the passive cooling around the outside all the heat sinking and all the electronics kind of sitting separate from the motor the overall footprint does end up being quite a lot bigger with the m10 than it is with the alpha and overall we end up with a distance or a depth about five centimeters longer than the alpha as well so let's get these other bases off the table now and have a closer look at the alpha in detail so let's talk about the details around the sim magic alpha wheelbase now so 15 newton meter direct drive motor in this and it is a servo motor as well now if we compare that to the 10 newton meter motor that we have inside the m10 direct drive wheelbase that is a hybrid stepper motor meaning it's a stepper motor with a resolver or an encoder on the back so it can know what its position is and make adjustments in real time so the advantage of a servo motor which is the preferred type of motor for a direct drive wheelbase over a stepper motor is that it's able to maintain high levels of torque at high rotational speed whereas a stepper motor tends to lose torque at higher speed so it's a bit of a compromise there now we were quite impressed with the overall performance of the m10 but i'm expecting that this will be a significant step up in the overall fidelity of the force feedback the numbers aside so the step up from 10 to 15 newton meters may not seem all that significant especially when we keep on saying that you don't necessarily need high amounts of torque to really sort of feel a lot of fidelity and really get a good driving experience the difference between the servo versus the hybrid stepper motor that we had in the m10 is i think where we're going to feel the bulk of the difference here between the two so i just want to make sure that was clear as well now we do have another video where we went into the differences between the types of motors used in direct drive wheelbases in a lot more detail so i'll link that down in the description for you guys below as well if you want to check that out and learn a little bit more now one of the first things that jumped out to me here is the versatility we have in terms of mounting options so we've got our standard mounting points on the front here which are compatible with the same front mounts that we would use for a semi cube 2 or a small mid motor so if you've got a front mount from sim labs or track racer or this is a simcoe one then that is going to be directly compatible there we also have some mounting holes on the side here as well we don't get any additional mounting brackets in the box with this though so if you are going to use those you'll need to come up with some sort of bracketry for yourself and then if we flip it over on its back and then if we flip it over onto its side so you can see the base you can see we have four more mounting holes in the bottom here as well so if you want to hard mount this to a desk or to a flat wheel deck or something like that then you do have that option too so it's good to see that they've included an abundance of choice here and there shouldn't be any problems when it comes to mounting these are all tapped directly into the housing of the motor assembly itself too so there's not going to be any issues with flex as far as i can see but obviously we'll comment on that once we've got it all mounted up on the rig in just a minute anyway now as we mentioned before we do have the connections coming out of the sides of the motor too so we've got our usb connection and our power connection and then on this side we've got our emergency stop and our can bus connection now i haven't seen any accessories using this can bus interface just yet so we're not going to cover that in today's video but if we do get our hands on some accessories in the future we'll obviously let you know about that but i do like the fact that these connections come out of the site obviously that does give us as we said before the ability to have our screen directly behind the motor without it interfering with any of the cables so that's a nice little touch there and because we can run these out to the sides as well they're not going to get snagged on our legs or anything like that now one thing i think is important to point out here as well is that power connection it does have and i'll just grab the connector side for you quickly as well it does have a little clip here so we actually have to pull back on the connection to release it so i do like that because it means it's not going to get knocked out by accident if we quickly plug that in for you we can see it clicks in and if i tug on that that's not going to come out i actually need to pull on the sheath there to release that and then it comes unplugged quite easily so that is a nice quality connector there i'm not going to have any issues with that coming unplugged on us which is a nice little touch now if we spin it around back to the front again for you guys you can see a little power light which will illuminate there and we'll look at that once we're up on the rig as well now the bluetooth transceiver for connecting to our wireless wheels is actually sitting directly behind this little plate here as well unlike with the simicube 2s where it's actually in the rear now the original simicube2s didn't have any sort of an antenna assembly built into them externally and i actually did have a few connection issues with my simicube2 ultimate originally ended up replacing it with the newer model which came with an external antenna but that was still sitting on the back and it is another thing that can become snagged or you know broken off over time if you're not careful so i do like the fact that they've kept this antenna integrated but it is sitting at the front here so we shouldn't have any connection issues i've never had any connection issues with the more modern simicube2s that have that external antenna but we'll comment on that as well we'll keep a close eye on that when we get up and driving see if we do have any dropouts with connection i don't anticipate that being an issue though with the connection sitting in the front here and then we've got the exact same quick release mechanism that we saw on the sim magic m10 and we'll talk about that a little bit more once we've got this mounted up on the rig and i can show you how the wheels click on but you can see there four little connector pins and sort of what looks like a wi-fi pattern there only two of those are actually active those are connected internally to power and that's how we supply power to our wheels so we don't have to worry about recharging batteries or batteries potentially going flat on our wireless wheels while we're driving which is another thing that i do particularly like about the sim magic wheel bases i do really think that they've nailed it when it comes to the design of their quick release and again when we review the sim magic m10 we noticed that there was no flex in the quick release on this which actually surprised us when we compared to say the likes of the phonetic wheelbases which do have a bit of an issue around flex in their quick release mechanism so i'm actually a big fan of the quick release that sim magic are using on all of their wheelbases and i do think that this is a bit of a wake-up call for the industry it is a pretty standard quick release that we actually see used in real life motorsport and i really do like the implementation here i was a little bit worried again when we did our initial m10 review about a year and a half ago now a year ago now that we may see some issues around wear and tear on the pcb here but i've been keeping a really close eye on all the forums all the facebook groups and i haven't actually seen a single person complain about issues with the quick release at all so yeah i really can't complain about it i think it's actually a really really clever design now i did promise you we'd have a quick look at the wheels as well because they are an integral part of the overall ecosystem with the sim magic bases so we have reviewed both of these wheels previously and i'll refer you to that down in the description below for more details but i just wanted to quickly highlight here we do have a nice leather wheel here and you know the quality of these wheels has actually been quite impressive i did actually spend about three months using this wheel on my simicube 2 at one point and yeah look i was really impressed with it overall it can actually connect these wheels via usb mini as well i think there is an option available for a different style of connector as well for those who are wanting to use this specifically on a different base but you can connect it via usb there and overall for the price point i do think that these wheels offer good quality the rotary encoders one is one thing that i've noticed they have improved over time as well the first gt1 wheel that i had i wasn't super impressed with the feel just the detents as you click through the different positions didn't feel super defined previously particularly when you're wearing gloves but this new wheel does seem to feel significantly better than the previous one did and that was something that i commented when we reviewed this wheel a couple of months ago as well i still do think that the shifters are a little bit subpar although they are magnetic shifters they don't have any adjustability built in and they do just feel a little bit vague when you compare them to a lot of other magnetic shifters on the market but again i think for the price point for these wheels they are very very good quality and they definitely do get the job done and the rest of the buttons are actually really good these guys here with the little metal surrounds around them on the gt4 wheel as well have a really really nice feel to them but again refer to the other videos where we reviewed these wheels in more detail we'll talk about these a little bit more when we get up and driving as well so i think before we move on and take a look at the internals of the wheelbase and start doing some driver testing now is a good time to talk a little bit more about build quality in general as well as customer service so syn magic when they released the m10 originally we could see that there were some corners that had been cut with that remember when we first unboxed it we had some screws that fell out in the packaging you know things like that that kind of were excusable for a wheelbase of that price point perhaps but definitely not excusable for something that costs as much as this does you've got to remember this is actually more expensive than a phonetic dd1 is and about on par with a simicube2 sport so we're expecting to see top notch top quality no expense bed kind of stuff here and i've got to say you know so far i have been very impressed with what i've seen one thing i do want to mention here though is the customer service side of things because i think this is really important now the sim magic alpha does come with a one-year manufacturer's warranty compare that with a dd-1 that comes with a three-year manufacturer warranty the simicube 2s come with a two-year warranty now what's a little bit different with sim magic which is really important to understand is that they don't offer customer support directly to customers unless you purchase directly from them yourself so if you're purchasing through a distributor you are completely at the mercy of the support level that is provided by that particular distributor so i would definitely recommend do your research and make sure you're buying one of these from somebody that you trust they have had a lot of issues with unauthorized distributors as they call them selling these and then not having any customer support at all and i have seen a few people that have been bitten by that they bought one of these from the cheapest bidder and then ended up you know in a situation where they weren't able to get any support because sim magic wouldn't help them either now sim magic do have a dedicated facebook group which is run by their own staff but i have seen some things in there that have had me a little bit concerned in the past i've been keeping an eye on that group basically to sort of get a picture of what's been going on with the brand in general whether there's any common issues that people have been having and things that we might want to sort of let you guys know in a review video and also keeping an eye on the progress with the m10 as well since we reviewed that now i have seen a couple of things that have concerned me and i think that it's more down to the actions of one individual rather than the brand as a whole i don't think it's necessarily indicative of the experience that you should expect to have as a sim magic customer but yeah i've seen a couple of instances where comments have been deleted or review videos have been deleted when they haven't liked what the person's had to say so while they do have the right to do whatever they want with their own facebook group and i mean that's not up to me to decide how they should manage it i do just think it's important to be aware that you know the group is heavily moderated so you're not necessarily going to get an accurate picture of exactly what the customer experience is like just based off that group alone so i'll definitely do some wider research asking some other independent groups asking some of the sim racing groups that aren't managed by manufacturers themselves i've always been really happy with the communication and the level of support that i've received from simrix.com so i have absolutely no problem recommending them but yeah just do your research and you shouldn't have any problems but let's move on now let's get the back of this taken off show you the insides and then we can get driving so i've quickly taken out the four screws that secure the back plate here onto the motor assembly now unfortunately the cabling itself internally is quite short and there's no connector on there it is actually soldered directly to the main board inside so i can't really pull it apart any further we don't own this wheelbase so you know i don't want to take any risks with it and potentially break it or anything like that so this is about as far as we can go here but i can tell you looking at the pcb there it's all wave soldered and i don't see any red flags whatsoever so everything looks to be nice and good quality there no no obvious problems or no obvious shortcuts that have been taken that looks absolutely fine internally now just a couple of other quick things to note while we do have this apart in terms of the hardware that's being used internally so we talked about the quick release in a little bit of detail earlier and i do have a separate video where we actually pulled one of these quick releases apart and showed you the internal workings and how you can actually use one of these bases we did it with the m10 base but obviously being the same quick release it works exactly the same way for the alpha 2. so you can mount other quick releases on here should you wish to do so you can scavenge the power to use it for other purposes all those sorts of things so check out that video if you want to see more detail on the quick release itself but look internally here we've got a 12 bit resolution encoder for the motor position so that gives us 16 385 points of resolution or data points throughout the rotation now if you compare that to the vrs direct force pro and the cmeq 2 sport or pro those use 22-bit encoders which gives us 4.2 million points of resolution throughout the 360 degrees of rotation so quite significantly higher there whether or not that actually makes a difference in terms of the usage we'll comment on that when we go for a drive in just a minute but a little point there to note other than that we have a 4 000 hertz refresh rate for the motor control itself so the communication between the motor and the control device and then a 1 000 hertz communication rate through the usb interface to the game itself so pretty standard stuff there nothing particularly out of the ordinary so let's get this put together now let's get it up on the rig we'll talk a little bit more about the quick release anything we noticed there in terms of flex then we can get to the software and driving okay so we're all up and running in the sim here now i wanted to take you through a couple little things around the wheel the quick release and the base before we get into the software and go for a drive so first thing i noticed when i sat down in the cockpit is a big bright power light that's kind of shining directly in your face now admittedly when i have this particular wheel mounted i can't see that light because of the angle i have the bass sitting at it kind of blocks it out behind the quick release but depending on the angle you have your wheelbase set at this may be a bit of a problem now you can always just put a bit of tape over it if it bothers you but i just wanted to call that out because i thought it was a little bit strange to have a bright power light directly in your face when you're driving uh they could always move it off to the bottom or something like that i guess it's there so that you can remember to switch the base off when you're done driving but yeah i would like to see that move but anyway not a big deal so on to the quick release and this is one of my favorite quick releases in simracing simply because it's very simple it gets the job done there's no flex in it and it's just overall a really clever design now it's adapted across from the d1 spec quick release that you'll find in a lot of real life race cars and there is footage out there of people actually mounting these wheels directly into their race car and vice versa as well so that is possible now it is keyed so it will only go on in one direction and you can see in the back here we've got our little power pins only two of those are actually used that's just for power going through the base and you can see on the front here we've got this little wi-fi looking symbol so we align that pointing to the left with the mounting screws facing straight up and down then we grab our wheel and we literally just push it straight on like that goes on very very easily and then to release it we just pull on the quick release and it pops straight off again now there's no need to go into software or reset anything as well as soon as you plug the wheel in it just starts working immediately and it really is as simple as that so big fan of this quick release i really do think they've nailed it and we can see here as i move the wheel around there's a little bit of flex in the wheel itself and we talked about that when we reviewed these wheels in another video which i've linked down in the description for you guys but there's a tiny i can feel a tiny tiny tiny amount of play there when i really really force it just a little bit of a clicking feeling but yeah i mean it's it's absolutely minimal and it's definitely not something that's going to be a problem for you when you're driving you can see the wheel itself is flexing long before there's any flex in the stem or the wheelbase itself and everything feels very nice and solid so that is all good no problems at all nothing to complain about with the quick release as i mentioned earlier in the video i was a little bit concerned when we did the m10 review that we might see issues of wear and tear on those pins but i have been keeping a close eye on this and i haven't seen a single report of anybody having issues with those pins wearing out or being bent or anything like that so i think yeah overall the quick release design is really great now just quickly before we look at the software as well i can tell you sitting here and spinning the wheel freely in my hands very very very smooth every bit as smooth as the simicube 2 sport pro and ultimate and as i've mentioned before those and the vrs direct force pro are the only wheelbases that i've ever tested or direct drive wheelbases at least that do have that completely smooth rotation the phonetic dd1 and dd2 do have that slight notchiness now admittedly that has improved a lot in more recent firmware builds so it's almost at the point now where it's completely negligible but this is absolutely battery smooth there's not a hint of cogging at all in there but we'll talk about all that in more detail when we go for a drive in just a minute let's take a look now at the software configuration side of things now i've jumped onto simriggs.com which was my distributor for the base so i'm going to scroll down and find the download and manual software here click on that link and that's going to take us through to the sim magic.com web page now it's great to see that sim magic actually do have their own website now that's been one of the complaints that the community's had for a long time is that there wasn't an official sim magic website just distributed ones but they do have their own site now which is a i guess a centralized location where you can always find the latest drivers and firmware so that's a big step forward for them that's something that i was really looking forward to seeing now one other thing as well i want to mention if we click across to download and attachments we can see there's instruction manuals as well and i'll just quickly go across to the instruction manual here because this was something that did really impress me very very very detailed instruction manual now there are still a few little translation issues in here it's a little bit difficult to read in a few places but all the information is there and you know it's very well presented they've done a very good job now one thing that i did notice here when i was scrolling through the manual is it says the built-in encoder has a resolution of 262 1444 pulses per revolution whereas the simrix.com spec sheet said 16 385. so that's quite a big difference there i'm not sure which one is actually accurate this could be a mistake in the manual it could be a mistake on simrig's website i have seen this same number quoted elsewhere as well though so i just wanted to call that out i'm not 100 sure it's probably not going to make a whole lot of difference to the driving feel anyway but i did just want to call that out i'm not sure which one it is so just wanted to make that clear for you guys but we'll continue on and you can see a whole bunch of information here what to see in the packaging how to mount the quick release you know all this stuff so you guys can download and skim through this yourselves but i just want to point this out it's got instructions for firmware updates and all the bits and pieces that you're going to need if you buy one of these so we'll close that off now and go back to the download page and we're going to use the alpha software english version so we're going to download that and it's just an executable file that you download and run through a standard installation wizard to get the software installed so we don't need to show you all that you guys know how to install software by now i would hope so once we've run through the installation visit we'll now have a folder in our c drive root directory called sim magic alpha we can open that up and we've got our executable for the alpha manager software which is the main software we're going to be looking at here we also have an executable here called alphachannel.exe that allows us to choose the channel that we want to use for the wireless communication with the wheel we didn't have to change any of this out of the box though i was really impressed this is one of the things we mentioned in our m10 review previously we had a lot of problems getting things running out of the box i'm really happy to say in this case everything just worked we literally just plugged the base in installed the software opened it up and everything just worked straight out of the box so that was great but if you do need to change the wireless communications channel for some reason you can do that from here you can see channel 60 is selected currently but we can drop down and we can choose from a range of different channels here simply select it and then close the software and we're good to go now we had some issues with updating the firmware on the m10 previously and i'm sorry to say unfortunately this does seem a little bit clunky still and this is one area that i would really love to see them improve we open up this alpha wheel update online executable and you can see it just says equipment not found straight away now i've been through all the troubleshooting steps all the usual protocols and for some reason i just cannot get this to work if i click on yes here and i click on start download the button's just not enabled if i click on check update nothing happens there as well now again we haven't actually needed to update the firmware so it hasn't actually been a problem but i just think this is something that they could integrate into the main software package to tell you when there's an update available and automatically allow you to install it rather than having to open a separate executable and have to sort of clunk around with stuff like this so you know it is what it is there is a troubleshooting guide here as well that runs through but again we've followed all the steps here one of the things that calls out is uh whereas it keeps scrolling down equipment not found so it says exit the software restart the wheel and go back to step one we tried that obviously and it hasn't worked but that hasn't stopped us from being able to get up and running anyway so not a major issue but again just something that i wanted to point out to you guys but the main star of the show here is the alphamanager.exe so we're going to open that up now and this is where we can make all of our fine-tuning adjustments to the calibration of the wheel so if we click on calibration here you can see all the buttons are showing up they highlight as we press them now one thing that's important to quickly note here is this toggle switch on the left hand side is for the calibration of the wheel itself it's not a switch that's mappable inside your games and again we covered that when we reviewed these wheels in previous videos but all the other buttons are all functional you can see they all pop up shifters are showing up as well as we push the buttons they show up in the calibration tool we've got our rotary encoders as well and those are also push buttons so we can see as we push those down they show up too and if we quickly pop this wheel off and swap it over for my gt one wheel which has analog axis on it as well we'll just quickly show you this and this is a good opportunity to show you how the interchangeability works as well so immediately that's detected you can see the lights all light up and that is working so we didn't have to restart any software or anything like that and now you can see we have an analog access here as well for our clutch so all really nice and clean now one thing that's really cool about this particular wheel as well we have a switch on the back here that we can toggle and that allows us to actually change the colors on the wheel too so you can see as we push the buttons they cycle through different colors so we can set it up to be however we want or off as well so we have the option for off if we don't want lights yeah nice and simple and i am a big fan of these wheels i think they work really well the shifters could use a little bit of improvement they don't have a lot of adjustability and they're not the best feeling magnetic shifters that i felt but otherwise really really do like these wheels but i'll hand this one back to tom again now we go pop this guy back on there we go and let's jump back across to i'll show you state quickly here as well so we can see here the firmware version software version there's some contact information too now i don't know how good they are at responding to emails that they receive from that address because as we said before they do like people to contact their distributor rather than them directly but over here under system state we've got a bunch of warning lights as well so you can see normal operation at the moment if we were to get an over current that light would light up but as we can see a bunch of different triggers here for various different fail states so we can see exactly what's going wrong we've even got an ass error there so if you have a problem with your ass anyway so let's go back to the steering calibration here this is where the bulk of the magic happens now one thing before we get started here i wanted to call out which i really like is we've got this little question mark button here which we can click on and that brings up some tool tips for most of the adjustments here by the game effects but i'll explain that to you in just a moment as well so it's really nice to see they've taken the time to write some explanations here and they are quite well written as well they are kinda heavy tech and i think we can probably distill them a little bit for you guys as we go through this part of the video but for the most part it's going to explain exactly what we need to know to get the job done so these are the default settings that are in here by default and i can already see i don't know why you'd have total force which is the wheelbase's overall strength set to 30 which would be like you know five or six newton meters uh we're going to want that probably closer to 10 or 12 i would imagine so straight away i'm going to bump that up to i think 70 which would be about 10 newton meters remembering again we have 15 newton meters of total force available to us but before we get into all that one thing i do want to point out here is we've got a little section here for save as and that allows us to save our own profile so you can see i've actually already got one in there that i've started to set up for eye racing based off some settings that i've been looking at from other people and i'll talk about that in just a moment too for you guys but we can save our own ini files here for our own configurations of different cars or different sims and because these are just basic ini files you can also drag other people's profiles into this folder and load them yourself as well so even though we don't have an import export button so to speak you can do it that way just drag it into the folder and you'll see it available in this little drop down menu here so you can see i can choose between data ini which is just the default settings we've got loaded here minus the 70 adjustment we just did and then iracing.ini sitting here as well which is our other configuration so we've got a right storage button which allows us to write or commit the settings to the wheelbase and then read which allows us to pull the settings off the wheelbase and see what we're actually working with here now making adjustments in here does appear to affect the wheel in real time as well so if i crank up my friction for example i can straight away feel that that's gotten a lot stiffer crank it back down to 10 where it was hit enter and it goes back to how it was straight away so it's nice that you can feel that immediate effect to what you're doing in here it makes it a lot easier to kind of fine tune and you know get things to feel how you like so let's just quickly go through some other settings here i'm going to start off with angle adjustment obviously we've got a centering button here as well so we center our wheel hit center and we're centered nice and simple we've got an angle adjustment which goes between 1600 so if you're doing truck simulation or something like that you can you know do the roundy roundies now remember because we've got a director of wheelbase here there's no mechanical bump stops so it's all software controlled now one thing that i have noticed and we'll just wind this back down to 360 degrees quickly to show you guys so 360 is what you would use for say formula one for example we'll wind that down to 360. now when i rotate it through you can see when i hit the bump stop i'm getting a bit of a runaway state here where the wheels start bouncing like crazy if we go the other way as well you'll see the same thing too now what that is is it's the wheel reaching where it wants its soft bump stop to be or it's software based bump stop to be and it's saying okay you've reached this point go back a couple of steps to outside of that bump stop but because i'm still applying pressure here what it's doing is it's going back into the bump stop and it's saying reset and then it's going back in and it's getting into like a loop where it's just going bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce so it's not got the smarts to kind of go all right well i know that you're at the bump stop i can see that you're applying pressure so kind of hold it somewhere around here it's just going reset reset reset reset constantly so we're probably not going to notice that when we're driving it's i mean for me at least it's quite rare that i actually hit the mechanical bump stops or sorry the software-based bump stops when i'm driving but just something to be aware of something that i think can definitely be improved and we noticed something similar with the m10 when we did a review of that about a year ago now as well i'm going to set this back to 900 again for now and hit enter and that takes us back to 900 degrees of rotation which is what we'll be using for the majority of gt style cars but again you can see when i hit that bump stop we do get the bouncing effect now it's quite a nice feeling bump stop it feels quite realistic compared to when you hit the bump stop in a real car so they've done well there but just a little thing that they can definitely improve i think and again it is important to remember that this is a software-based thing so it's certainly not a reflection on the quality of the hardware and it is something that i'm sure they can fix into the future so just to note that for you guys so let's go through these settings methodically for you now so mechanical settings are settings that apply at a firmware level or driver level to the base itself the game effect settings are filters that go on top of the effects coming out of the game so almost like a preamplifier kind of thing if you want to think of it that way and then game force again is almost like a preamp that adjusts the gain level coming out of the game before it actually goes through the drivers and firmware so everything that we're doing up here is affecting the way the wheelbase responds to those game effects and everything down under game effects and game force is actually manipulating the effects as they come out of the game themselves now one thing that you will notice is some of these effects are grayed out you can see at the moment the only effect i have here is game damper and constant force so what that means is basically different games output force feedback in different ways some use canned effects some use physics based effects and depending on how that's handled by the individual sims through the direct input protocol will determine whether or not these are available to adjust and we've got another video which i'll link down in the description where we went through that in a lot of detail and explained exactly how all that works so i encourage you to check that out if what i'm saying here is not making any sense to you but i mean this is a basic explanation of what you need to know to get up and running at least so let's run through all these individual ones now total force adjust the maximum amount of torque available to the base use it carefully according to your personal situation it says here so again we've got this set to 70 which is about 10 newton meters that's generally where i end up on most of the wheelbases that i've tested and then over on the other side we've got our constant force which is adjusting the gain level actually coming out of the game itself so i like to leave that set to 100 i think it makes sense to make use of the full dynamic range as it comes out of the game and then just adjust our total force depending on our personal preference up here so i'm going to leave that at 100 and then adjust my total force to preference over here we then have filter frequency which is the cutoff frequency of the interpolation filter so we can play around with that to our liking as well now i don't know exactly how that's going to impact things just yet so we'll obviously play around with that and let you guys know once we've found a spot that we like we then have wheel speed which allows us to adjust the overall speed in which the wheel can respond to movements so this is generally you're probably going to want to leave this set to 100 i would imagine for most cars maybe the exception to this might be where you're drifting if it's accelerating a little bit too quickly and being a little bit too snappy for you but again you can fine tune this to your own preference i like to have a nice snappy responsive wheel that kind of responds to you know small twitches or oversteer understeer kind of effects as quickly as possible so i'd imagine i'm probably going to end up leaving this at around the default setting of 100 but again we'll talk about this later on once we've had some time to play around so then moving on to wheel spring this is pretty self-explanatory this is just the springing effect or the return to center effect so you can see at the moment with it set at zero wherever i stop the wheel is pretty much where it sits if we crank this up to 100 then the wheel tries to return to center now most games actually have some sort of a spring effect or return to center effect actually built into their own force feedback effects so generally i would imagine you're going to leave this at zero or maybe increase it slightly if you find the game effect isn't quite strong enough for your preference but i i tend to find that that feels pretty artificial in most games on most wheel bases that i've tried so i'm imagining we're probably going to end up leaving this somewhere around zero wheel damper this is just a dampening effect that gets rid of some of the robotic feeling that you might experience again i would imagine we probably end up keeping this quite low but we can adjust that to our preference wheel friction very self-explanatory once again at the moment a minimal amount of resistance there at 10 if we crank it down to zero we've just got the resistance as it comes out of the game and again because we do have a game running in the background there is a little bit of resistance there you can kind of feel the weight of the car transferring across but we'll talk about that in a moment too then if i crank that friction up to 100 the wheel becomes quite stiff that actually feels very very very smooth again we'll talk about this in a moment too but very very smooth that's unrealistically heavy where it is at the moment but again it's a combination of the force feedback in the game plus an effect being applied to the base itself on top of that so i'm going to crank that back down to where do i have it i think 10. we'll hit enter and then we have our game damper effect which applies a dampening filter to the effects coming out of the game i don't actually feel any difference when i play around with this at all so i'm just going to leave this set at 100 which is what they're recommending in the settings here as well but again check out my other video for a more detailed explanation on exactly how these kinds of settings work and what they're actually doing in the background so then down the bottom here we have a couple more settings for suspension soft normal and hard and then response between stable and wild so we'll have a play around with those in just a moment as well i'm not 100 sure i'm assuming because they're sitting under game effect they're going to be applying to the effects from the game and not a mechanical setting as well but we'll play around with those in just a moment to let you know what we find so i think that covers pretty much everything we need to for alpha manager for now look overall it seems really good i mean all the settings that you need are there it's well presented one thing that i'm not seeing is a static force reduction filter and that was one of the criticisms that i made of the vrs direct force pro wheelbase as well that's one thing that i really do love about the phonetic wheelbases and the simicube 2 wheelbases in particular but really at face value at least that's the only thing that i see obviously missing from here everything else that we need is kind of there and it's all very well presented it's all very approachable it doesn't look overwhelming when you look at it and of course because we do have these tool tips which explain what each of these settings do that kind of makes you feel a little bit more confident going into it as well but let's go and do some driving now we'll start off in eye racing i think which is where i'm most familiar where i do the majority of my driving these days we'll set a base point and then we'll test out in a bunch of other sims as well now normally what i would do in this segment is take you for a drive and kind of just take you along for the ride as i'm discovering and kind of making observations in real time for the very first time now i did actually record exactly that yesterday but to be honest with you guys i was really underwhelmed with the performance of the bass there were some aspects that i really liked the general smoothness was good the feeling of weight transfer understeer and oversteer were quite good as well but just the general texture in the road uh you know feeling the difference between grass and road asphalt ripple strips things like that were really really lacking to the point where i couldn't even tell if i was dipping a wheel onto the grass so i kind of figured that something must be wrong and i thought that it'd be better to spend the time to really get to know the base talk to a bunch of other people get involved in some of the support communities as well and just get my head around all of that stuff before sharing the experience here because i want to make sure that this is represented in the most fair way possible and i don't think that sharing a bad experience off the bat is necessarily a good and professional thing to do because some people might be skipping through the video and only watch that bit and think that i've got a bad overall impression so i wanted to make sure that was accurate so what i did was spend about 10 hours in total we actually started this process yesterday and i was up most of the last night talking to people so we went back first of all to the distributor simrigs we got them to test out with the cars and track combinations that i'm going to be using in eye racing here for you guys as well and send me what they believe to be the best settings that they could come up with as a base point i also spoke to some other owners as well laurence de sosoi who you guys probably seen his review uh he spent quite a bit of time helping me out with his settings as well which is great he's got quite a number of months of experience with the same wheelbase under his belt so it was really great to talk to him uh we got involved in the sim magic owners group on facebook as well i put a question out there for people to send me their settings i didn't sort of explain that i was having problems or anything because i didn't want to sort of you know cloud people's judgment i just wanted to see what their settings were so i could test them out for myself we also checked out the sim magic discord community as well and that was a really good experience i'm actually really glad that things played out the way they did because it gave me an excuse to get involved in those communities as a normal customer and kind of see how they run and there was a lot of interaction there a lot of people sharing their settings with each other and yeah i basically spent about 10 hours just testing through everybody's settings to kind of come up with what i felt was kind of best and then fine tune around that myself so one interesting observation was that different people had vastly different settings and i think that goes to show and cement the fact that you know force feedback is a really subjective thing and you know personal preference does play a massive part in what's going to feel good to one person and bad to another person so to speak but in saying that i think that there are some fundamental aspects of force feedback that are you know necessary and need to be present to communicate what's going on with the car well and then you can fine tune to your preference around that but obviously we need to have smoothness we need to have a realistic feeling of the car's weight we need to have a realistic feeling of the interface between the tyre and the road surface so we want to be feeling textures we want to be feeling weight transfer of the car we want to be feeling understeer we want to be feeling oversteer and we want those things to happen quickly as well so there's not any lag in the response and we're able to respond as quickly as possible so those are all the things that i generally look for and then i fine tune around that so what i wanted to do now is quickly show you the settings that i actually landed on in the alpha manager software itself then i'll take you through a quick calibration process in eye racing itself as well to show you how we actually landed at the best settings there as well so quickly alt tab out and with alpha manager back up on the screen now these are those default settings that we were looking at just before with the addition of increasing the total force from 30 which was obviously way too low up to 70 which is about 10 newton meters of peak force which is about the same as what i run on the vrs direct force pro that we reviewed recently the simicubes the uh dd1 and the dd2 as well so we're trying to keep it as even playing field as possible and just kind of focus on the differences in the characteristics of the force feedback rather than the total strength because i think it's pretty obvious by now that 15 newton meters of total strength is going to be enough for the majority of people but after as i said about 10 hours of fiddling around and fine-tuning what i landed on was actually pretty much exactly what the guys at simriggs ended up sending me so i'll click on my eye racing profile here now and write that to the storage so it's active on the wheelbase you can see there's only a couple of little changes here on this side total force we still landed at 70. we did a couple of little adjustments to the interpolation filters wheel speed we ended up leaving at 100 which is what i expected remembering again we want to have a snappy response as possible friction and spring we ended up adjusting a little bit here we'll damper we ended up leaving at 10. you guys can see what we've got here for yourselves but again this is very much a personal preference thing this is what i felt ended up suiting my personal preference best you can see here suspension we ended up setting too hard and response to wild but again i didn't feel a massive amount of difference in changing these settings so that's what we ended up landing on we'll jump back into eye racing now quickly and let's just quickly jump into our options menu here so i can run you through a couple of things so we're just going to reset our force feedback settings here quickly for you so we can start from scratch obviously we need enabled force feedback so the force feedback is active reduce force when parked that's just a personal preference thing if you don't want to have stiff steering when you're sitting parked now use linear mode i like to have turned on for direct drive wheelbases again making full use of the full amount of dynamic range that's available to us now if you find that road textures and things like that aren't quite defined enough for you so ripple strips you know dirt surfaces tarmac surfaces cracks in the road then you can switch this off but again for direct drive wheelbases i tend to leave this turned on now iracing has an auto tuning function built in which is the best way i think to avoid clipping and get the maximum amount of dynamic range out of the game settings so what i like to do is set my wheel force to the maximum amount of force that i have set at so remember we set it to 70 before which is about 10 newton meters and then we're going to use the auto tune feature for our strength so you can see at the moment it's set to 12 and we can see the little auto button is disabled so if we now close this off we'll click done you can see now we've got our little force feedback gauge here so you can see that bar moves around as we move the steering and you can see we've got our graphics adjustments here as well now when the auto calibration is complete we'll see a little auto button pop up here and that will allow us to adjust our force feedback strength to allow for the maximum amount of dynamic range with minimal amount of clipping now we may still see a little bit of clipping which will be indicated by this gauge turning red and maxing out when we're doing things like hitting walls or bumping into other cars but the aim here is to make use of the maximum amount of dynamic range under normal driving conditions so bumping over ripple strips you know running over grass little bits and pieces like that we want to get as much dynamic range there as possible we don't really care if it starts to clip a little bit when we're bumping into walls because you know it doesn't really the detail doesn't really matter in those kinds of scenarios so what we should see here is a force feedback gauge kind of you know bouncing around a little bit like that as we run over road textures grass textures ripple strips and we should see it bumping up as we go through corners when the cornering force is enabled and if we really bump over ripple strips we'll see it bump up and if we hit walls we should see it going up into the red zone so we're going to head out on track now we're in the cayman gt4 today around montreal which is a good track to test with because it's got some really aggressive curves that you do need to bump over to to go nice and fast and you kind of run right out up against the grass for a couple of corners as well without ripple strips so it's really important to be able to feel when you're dipping a wheel onto the grass now admittedly this isn't the most lively car in the world but you do get a good sense of traction control kicking and you kind of have to balance the back end you can kind of feel the back end breaking away a little bit even under abs as you turn into turn one in particular as well so it's a good track to test we will test out a couple of other cars and of course we will test out some other sims a little bit later on as well for you to give you the full picture but let's head out now i'll get my headphones on we'll run through this auto calibration it should take about half a lap i would imagine before we see auto pop up on the screen and then once that happens we should be good to set our maximum strength automatically so what we're going to feel here initially is the force feedback is going to be super strong at least it might not it might not be that strong because force feedback is only set to 12 but then once the autocal is finished we'll be able to adjust that down so let's head out here now we're going to keep an eye on that force feedback gauge we will see that um it will max out a few times probably and it does feel very stiff to me one thing i will comment on though is that the overall feeling of the force feedback is very very very smooth and that was something that did impress me immediately with this wheelbase even before we got into car and driving even though i said before that the you know first impression wasn't fantastic one thing i will say you know and i always comment on this whenever i jump in a car does it feel notchy does it feel grainy is there any cogging effect present just sort of sitting stationary and you can see there on the screen as i turn the wheels the car is kind of lifting up on one side or the other as the wheels turn the contact path changes and that is represented really well with this wheel i can feel the wheel kind of raising up on its sides but yeah this wheelbase does feel every bit as smooth i'm very happy to say as the semi cube 2s do just through turning and rotation here there's no cogging effect present at all so let's get driving again just wanted to make sure that was clear for you guys [Music] so we are going to be on cold tires initially as well but we'll bump over a couple of ripple strips here and that is a little bit too stiff for me at the moment you can see it was just about maxing out it feels like four two back strength of 12 is actually not too bad but i'm not seeing any clipping just yet [Music] and what's important here is you can see the road texture is represented by those little tiny bounces in the false feedback so even when i'm driving straight i'm not putting any turning force on the wheel you can see those little ripples and that's the road texture that should be being communicated through the wheel now [Music] okay there you go now you can see the auto buttons popped up so let's just quickly come to a stop again and if we hit that auto button 16.2 so it actually ended up putting up a little bit so let's just go for a little bit more of a drive again okay turn so we can see we were starting to get up into the yellow zone there but we'll see how it goes when we bump over the curves in the final turn here past the wall of champions [Music] break a little early because we are still on cold tires get up over the ripple okay you could see it was clipping there so i'm not super happy with that auto calibration i might actually wind that back down to about 10 i think [Music] i think it probably just didn't have quite enough time to adjust itself fully because we weren't really driving at full speed i think if we've been more aggressive it would have probably calibrated a little bit lower but you get the idea of how that's meant to work we'll get turned in again here okay now you can see as we go over those ripple strips we're making full use of the force feedback so we're getting all of that fidelity but we're not getting any clipping we'll just test it again through here quickly as well bump up over the ripple and yeah that's fine no clipping there going on at all but if we do put it into a wall you should see it will go red there you go so yeah as we hit the wall it did clip but again that's not important because we don't really need to feel the detail in a crash it's more important that we're making full use of the dynamic range for normal driving so let's reset quickly and i'll talk about the overall driving impressions in eye racing a little bit more we'll test it on dirt in just a moment as well i think but anyway let's head out here and talk a little bit more about the overall driving impressions having spent a good 10 hours fine tuning and tweaking things so as i kind of alluded to before the overall sensation of the weight of the car the transfer of the weight the balance and bumping over bumping over curl i won't say ripple strips but bumping over curves is quite good so very very smooth it's lacking a little bit of definition i feel compared to the dd1 the dd2 the simicube twos and the direct force pro the direct force pro i felt didn't have quite as much definition as the semi cubes in particular but this i feel is about the same as the direct force pro in terms of the overall i guess dampened feeling of the effects so it just doesn't quite have the same level of sharpness as i enjoy with the simicube 2s now i do have experience with the obviously i have the ultimate which is my daily driver but i do have quite a bit of experience with the sport and pro as well we reviewed those in detail a couple of months back and i spent a lot of time driving with those so i'm very familiar with them as well and i struggle to tell the difference between the ultimate and the pro but what i did notice was the sport with its reduced slew rate did actually feel a little bit less snappy and a little bit less responsive than this than the pro and the ultimate do and i'm feeling the same kind of thing here as well this just doesn't quite have the same level of responsiveness as the as the sport does even so i feel like i haven't actually seen published anywhere what the actual slew rate is with this motor but i feel like that's probably what the difference is and comparing against the direct force pro as well as the dd1 and dd2 i mean the dd1 is a more direct comparison at 20 newton meters um of torque but at a similar price point i think the main thing that i'm feeling this is this is definitely smoother than the dd-1 is about the same level of smoothness as we commented on in our direct force pro vrs wheelbase review but in eye racing at least it will comment on the other sims in just a moment as well what i'm finding and i have done probably a good 50 or so laps with this base now the definition in the fine little details so road textures curb textures so like ripple strips dipping wheel onto the grass it just feels a little bit robotic compared to what i was expecting out of this wheelbase so again overall smoothness is really good and there's nothing to complain about there at all it's every bit as good as the simi cubes are and any other direct drive wheelbase that i've tested so no complaints at all there and as we bump over these ripples i can feel that quite clearly but for example here if i when i'm driving along straight there's a little bit of road texture there you can see the force feedback gauge is bouncing around a little bit [Music] but it just has this underpinning robotic feeling to it it feels not it's it's funny because the wheel itself doesn't feel notchy like when i'm rotating it normally it doesn't feel notchy at all but the the texture effects do feel a little bit robotic and a little bit notchy and what i find is if i if i dampen those down if i use the settings to adjust those to adjust that robotic feeling out then overall it just feels too smooth and too you know too dampened in general i lose the fidelity but to bring that fidelity back again i i you know i find that robotic detail which is just you know compared to the semi-cube in particular semi-cube twos i should say just doesn't feel as nice in eye racing at least so we'll talk about the other ones in a moment too but let me just go through i'll do a slightly quicker lap here for you guys i'll just concentrate on what i'm doing hit all my normal braking markers so i'm feeling you know i'm feeling all the things that i need to feel to drive quickly but i think the exception to that is you know i'm not getting a clear sense of when i'm running up on ripple strips and just there like i mean for example when the back end stepped out i could catch that just fine like there was enough response time there that i could catch that slide and it wasn't a problem but for example here like when i run across the grass just onto that little bit of tarmac there as i extend the track i didn't feel the i didn't feel the texture of the grass so i wasn't really sure if my wheel was on the grass or not and obviously if you touch the brakes at that breaking point as your wheels just skimming the grass it's going to spin it's going to spin you almost immediately so i'll give you another example just come around here just before we do a hot lap so i felt a little bit of ripple there on the ripple strip but dipping a wheel on the grass there i really i can i can sense the understeer effect so i can feel that the front of the car is getting away from me but it doesn't feel like driving across grass it just feels like a bit of it almost feels like a vibration motor inside the wheel which just again like i mean it's it's a software thing so i'm sure it's something that they can fine-tune in the software later on i don't think that it's a reflection on the quality of the hardware but it's just lacking that definition so let's try and do a quick lap now so we'll get the back end to kind of step out on us a little bit there get it turned in nice and tight back on the gas as early as we can now my normal lap times around here are about high 44. oh a bit of a cut there that's all right we'll keep going a high 44 low 45 is my average lap around here so we'll see what we can get [Music] so you can see there i'm making little micro corrections as we start to push into traction control there and that's all absolutely fine this is the part i was talking about where we cut across the grass just a touch you have to be so careful there if you just touch that grass while you're on the brakes the car just spins almost instantly so this little areas like that which is i feel need to be improved at least for eye racing [Music] so we'll finish off this lap and then i'll jump into some rally cross and we can talk a little bit more about the texture because i think that's probably going to be a more i guess extreme test of what we're talking about [Music] here so there we go that was a 44.9 so i mean that's that's on par with my lap times that i do with my simicub2 ultimate so you know as i was saying that i guess the the raw pace is definitely there i'm feeling all the things i need to in terms of how the car communicates what it's doing back to me but i feel like consistency could potentially suffer just because of those little details you know dipping a wheel onto the grass for example if you miss that effect that could cost you the race and you know that's definitely not something we want to have happening so hopefully that's something that they can fix up in software but as i was saying you know you can bring in that detail a little bit more than what i have it here now but that comes at the cost of having an overall kind of robotic feeling in those textures and again it is just the texture so it's the road texture the grass texture ripple strips things like that it's not the feeling of the suspension it's not the feeling of weight transfer or traction loss anything like that those are all really really good it's just that road texture feeling that is lacking a little bit in eye racing so let's jump into dirt now see if it's any better there and then we'll jump into some other sims and test those out as well all right sonoma rallycross in the fiesta now so one little thing i wanted to show you guys and what i did again was get in touch with the guys at simriggs the distributor who sent me this and asked them for what they would recommend as their best rallycross settings just as a base point so i could fine tune around there because i wanted to make sure that i wasn't doing something completely you know crazy that nobody else would do just for my own personal preference so one thing i will mention here again we talked about the road texture issue before cranking up the minimum force a little bit does help with that as well so it brings out a little bit more of that texture as we were mentioning before as well it does come at the cost of a bit of a robotic feel but if you're finding that you're just not feeling the things you need to feel to go quickly then you can crank this up i found around about maybe 10 up to 15 percent was about the maximum anything over that it just starts to feel you know like a robot basically but what i'm going to do for rallycross i'm going to set this to about 11 which i know people are going to joke about cranking it up to 11 but that's what seems to feel good to me everything else we're going to leave exactly the same as we did before again wheel force at about 10 newton meters was more than enough strength for me and my little tiny arms but again 15 newton meters i think is going to be fine for the majority of people so if you're worried about the wheelbase not being strong enough for you honestly unless you're dwayne johnson forget about it it is strong enough for you so we'll hit done on that but let's drive out here and what i wanted to pay attention to is just the road texture so i'm not going to drive super fast to begin with not that i'd be capable of driving super fast anyway but again i'm just i'm just not getting a strong sense of road texture it is a lot better than it was yesterday when i was testing but the transition there for example between the road and the dirt and again here between dirt and road just not a massive amount going on there now we can see with our force feedback gauge there that there's not a whole lot of texture being transmitted to begin with most of what you're seeing there is the cornering force but you know when we're going straight you can see there's a little bit of stuff going on so we should be feeling that there's not a huge amount of dynamic range there but again comparing the exact same scenario to the semi cube we feel a lot more definition we feel real fine texture the vrs direct force pro was lacking a little bit compared and we talked about that in that review but yeah compared to the phonetic and the semi cubes i'm just not getting that same level of definition in the feedback even on the dirt here i should be feeling that graininess in the texture not to be confused with you know a grainy wheel feel but we should feel the grain of the you know the sand underneath the wheels and all and it's just it just feels kind of floaty on the dirt i'd say it's more of a problem for dirt than it is for road because road you can kind of get away with other than those little subtle instances where you might dip a wheel onto the dirt or something like that but it's really kind of taking away from the immersiveness overall because i'm just not getting that sense of driving on dirt but anyway i think that probably covers it in enough detail you guys get the point i think again this is something that can be improved with um you know with software i don't think that it's a problem with the wheelbase itself i'd say it's a software thing okay so let's give assetto corsa competition a try here so i've just used exactly the same settings as i was using for the vrs direct force pro which was the last time that i actually drove this sim so one thing i've noticed straight away there you can see the steering is crooked so we actually had this problem with the sim magic m10 as well now if i go back and have a look in the um in the sim magic calibration tool it's not that the wheel calibration's out for some reason certain sims don't seem to center themselves correctly you can see now when i've come to a stop it's actually corrected itself but when i drive off go back into first gear here as i take off the wheel goes off center again so what we actually need to do and i don't know if there's a way around this but what we actually need to do is calibrate the wheel off the same amount to the left and then when we come in the sim it comes straight so i'll quickly fix that calibration now but yeah not a problem in eye racing not a problem with some other sims either we'll let you know which ones we run into this issue with but acc for some reason yeah we need to recalibrate our center off to the left a little bit so just these little niggles with the software again it's it's down to the software not the hardware but you know these are the things that i think are important to point out because that's going to be frustrating every time you change sims you've got to go and kind of keep calibrating it over and over until you actually get the center correct because it's not as simple as just calibrating the center correctly in front of you so we have another look okay so it's about that far off to the right so we need to go the same distance off to the left and then calibrate it and that should come good all right so we've got that little calibration issue sorted now so let's have a bit more of a look at how this performs so immediately i'm feeling those little textures that i thought were missing in eye racing which surprises me because usually it's the other way around usually i find eye racing is the title that just works so i'm just going to dip a wheel onto the grassy quickly and immediately as soon as i do that i can feel the texture change so i'm immediately aware that i've done something that i shouldn't have and running up on the ripple there as well i could feel that quite comfortably through the wheel and the fine detail is there it doesn't feel robotic like it did in eye racing so i'd say as an initial impression this feels very similar to what it does with the simicube2 sport i would say it doesn't quite have that snappiness and that responsiveness of the pro and the ultimate and i think that's just down to the slew rate not being as fast again but yeah it's it's nice and smooth i'd say it's probably i mean the difference between the symbicube 2 sport and vrs direct force pro aren't huge in acc and i'd say this probably fits in about the same so nothing really remarkably different in any in any sense i'm feeling all the things i need to feel again and i mean i'm not the world's best gt3 driver and i'm not the most experienced driver in acc either which is why i kind of you know drew the bulk of the review in eye racing but i do think it's important to try and cover all bases as much as i possibly can for you guys and give you you know the raw impressions but i'm feeling that road texture so i can i can kind of get a sense of what the car is doing it's more immersive but i also feel like i'm in more control i feel more connected to the car and i get the sense you know that the weight transfer is good as well this car is a lot firmer than the previous cars we drove so you don't quite get quite that you know that massive sense of movement like we did in those cars but yeah i mean all the textures feel really good and i feel like the things that we're missing in eye racing are definitely here in acc and most importantly i think it kind of just worked out of the box and it's giving me a consistent experience with the other bases that i've tried in acc as well i mean one of the things i think is really important to call out in these types of reviews is the consistency between different sims and we've talked about that in every wheelbase review that i've done because fnatic as far as i'm concerned still seems to have the upper hand when it comes to consistency and i mean that's really important for people that want to be able to jump out of one sim and into another and still be fast and not have to go through a learning curve and i mean you can see my my pace here is way off just because i'm not used to driving this car and it feels so different or this sim i should say and it feels so different to eye racing where i'm used to driving whereas when i drive with the dd1 and the dd2 i can jump in and out of pretty much any sim with maybe the exception of race room and you know it feels pretty consistent across them so if that's something that's important to you you know i would still definitely consider that but no i'd say this this feels very very close to the direct force pro and the dd1 in terms of the quality of the feedback and the simicube2 sport the only maybe area where it feels advantageous over those is the dd1 feels a little bit more grainy by comparison to this this is really nice and smooth every bit as smooth as a simi cube in the vrs so let's move on to the next sim all right aceto corsa let's get out of here so we're driving in a mclaren p1 initial impression again very very smooth now i have spent quite a bit of time driving around in this as well just getting things fine-tuned and adjusted because we did have a few of the same issues that we had with iracing out of the box but i'm happy to say we got we got it to a pretty good place i still feel like the kerbs are lacking a little bit of texture here the road surface feels pretty good overall and i mean you can see the car feels very responsive very snappy very similar in the end to where we ended up with eye racing but just when i run over the ripple strips i'm not feeling a whole lot of texture there if any really at all and you know different tracks have different types of curves but nordschleife does have pretty aggressive curves so you would expect to really sort of feel them heavily and you know indeed when i drive with my other wheelbases i do feel them a lot more aggressively with similar settings to what i have here so again it seems to be certain sims and the way they translate some of the texture information just isn't being filtered as accurately with the sim sim magic alpha i should say got my words mixed up there not translating quite as accurately with this magic alpha as they do particularly with the simicu bases i feel like that's really where the textures are a lot sharper and not grainy but you really feel that grain and texture inside the surface again you can see the wheel kind of is moving around it's oscillating a little bit there but when i have my hands on the wheel it's hard to sort of picture it in the footage but i can feel the road texture quite comfortably it's there's no problems there [Music] but we'll dip a wheel onto the grass quickly up here and yeah there's just really not a whole lot of difference between the grass and the road unfortunately so i don't think we need to spend a whole lot of time here pretty much the same kind of impression a little bit better than eye racing in terms of the asphalt texture but definitely still lacking a bit in terms of overall texture and fidelity compared to the other direct drive wheel bases that we've tested around the same price point so let's move on to automobile lister two [Music] all right so porsche 962c in automobile lister 2 same car and track combination that we did the other day which i really enjoyed so i figured i'd do it while it's still fresh in my mind and i can remember exactly how it felt with my simi q2 ultimate now this is a very high powered rear wheel drive as you can see snaking around on me there so we don't really get the benefit of the downforce obviously until we're going nice and fast so we get a good opportunity to sort of snake things around here and really get a feel for the car so i can tell you straight away this feels really good once again it's similar kind of experience to acc in terms of just jumping and driving everything feels good i'm using exactly the same settings as i was in acc2 i don't really feel the need to change anything which is really good because obviously again we talk about that consistency between different sim titles and wanting to just sort of be able to jump in and drive but the things that are jumping out at me immediately uh i'm feeling the road textures that i want to feel once again which is great we'll go across the ripple strip a little bit here that feels really good too you can feel the back end kind of snapping on me there i got a car on my inside so i got to be careful get clear of him there [Music] we'll put a wheel up on the grass again too feel that yep feels really good and i can feel that slide i can correct for it straight away maybe the the slew rates down a little bit as we know with the compared to the ultimate and the pro but feels very similar to the sport once again no major differences at all to speak of i'd say you know in a blind test i probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the vrs this and the semi cube2 sport in ams2 just based off this experience i think that the dd1 still has that kind of underlying slight notchiness to it the cogging effect that we've talked about so i would say this would probably be my preference over the dd-1 for this particular game but this is the first game where i would say that's probably the case maybe maybe acc as well but everything else so far i think i'd probably still pick the the phonetic base just purely based off force feedback we're not talking about ecosystem or any of the other features or anything here just based off force feedback quality alone but let's get some tail slide action happening again through here yeah i mean this is this is taking me to another place in terms of immersion just as much as i experienced with the semi-cube 2 ultimate when i did this exact same scenario a couple of days ago so yeah i'm really happy with it i really i can't feel anything to complain about at all in ams2 yeah a little bit more muted in terms of force feedback than eye racing and acc are but i mean that's just the characteristic of the game i think it's kind of the same experience everywhere rather than being a complaint about the wheelbase so let's move on to the next one so a quick test in f1 2020 as well i'm just going to potter around here really slowly just to sort of feel the textures and i can feel the road texture pretty much the same as it feels honestly with every other direct drive wheelbase that i've tested the detail and the force feedback in this game isn't fantastic anyway so i don't really feel like it's ever going to be a true test or comparison between different bases but if i run off onto the grass here i can feel the texture there so i can definitely feel the difference between we'll go around turn one here as well and just run it up on the ripple strips i can feel that perfectly fine so you know i'm feeling all the things that i need to feel get drs going there as well the road texture feels good and i didn't have to make any major fine-tuning adjustments to get things working my pedal calibration is way out you can see as i hit the gravel it's bouncing around we'll go over the little sausage curbs here as well and you can see that's rippling well and yeah i mean it just feels every bit as good as it does with any other director of wheelbase really so let's move on to dirt rally too all right so last up dirt rally now we did have to do a little bit of configuration here just to get the force feedback working at all which we expected and that was part of the instructions it's very easy took me probably less than two minutes to get it sorted out so not a problem you just drag an xml file and i'll put a link down in the description for all those instructions as well for you guys but look i mean overall quite similar feeling to eye racing here that the definition in the road texture is there i mean you can feel again the things that you need to feel like i can feel when i run off onto the grass and there's definitely some texture in the dirt but it's just a little bit vague a little bit robotic and i found that if i cranked things up to really kind of try to bring that detail out a little bit more it just tended to feel a little bit robotic compared to the sim cube i think again probably more similar to the vrs direct force pro once we got that working we had to do a similar hack to get that wheelbase working in this game as well so just to make that clear for you guys too but yeah i'd say a similar amount of definition a similar amount of detail and we have i have spent quite a bit of time filling around with the settings here as well to try and maximize it but definitely a little bit behind what i would say from the semi cube twos as well as the phonetic dd1 and dd2 for dirt rally so overall again though you can feel all the things you need to feel to drive as i completely wipe myself out but i think that's probably a good point to stop and get into our conclusions all right so conclusions on the sim magic alpha wheelbase so tom's had a decent drive as well in a couple of different titles to uh kind of get his opinion as well he's used to driving with a dd1 whereas i'm used to driving with the simicube 2 ultimate as my daily driver so we thought it'd be good to kind of get a mix of opinions in here for you guys as well so what did you think from your driving yeah i mean overall i've had a great experience driving with it's been good fun um it's had a lot of pros going for it's got that really nice uh sweet smoothness about it similar to what we had with the vrs yeah it's definitely i'd say one of the outstanding features is just the overall smoothness yeah and refinement in the driving experience and definitely coming from the dd1 that is a real bonus yeah that's something i do really like yeah so this is the dd1 and the dd2 that i've spent most of my time driving with um out of the phonetic range at least they do have kind of an underpinning graininess to them that you you tend to not notice so much when you've been driving for a while but if you pay attention to it it's always nice i mean i didn't really know that it existed until i started trying these other ones and i'm like oh okay okay i can feel the damage yeah exactly so but it is there and it's important to acknowledge that but what did you think about details yeah there was definitely something missing yeah when i compared it to my dd1 did a fair bit of time in the skip barber on um eye racing and definitely over curbs and something somewhere in a car where you would expect to feel a lot on the kerbs yeah i just wasn't getting it um yeah and then over grass and that kind of thing there was something missing after we spent a fair bit of time tweaking it we we managed to get something out of it and it was okay yeah it wasn't detrimental but it always kind of felt like it was for me at least it always felt like it was kind of a compromise so yeah if you dialed those track effects and remember we are talking about track effects specifically here we're not talking about suspension movement or weight transfer or anything because all of those things were really good i thought yeah yeah like up there with the best absolutely but when it came to those finer details it was a trade-off between winding those details up and having a kind of notchy robotic feeling in those details not a notchy feeling overall but not cheap robotic feeling details but if you dampen those details down then you're not feeling enough of them so yeah for me it wasn't something that was making me less of a quality driver or anything like that it wasn't ruining my laps or anything like that but it was less immersive yeah it wasn't as is cool yeah yeah okay so and we're comparing that to i think probably i mean the wheel bases and we've got a bit of a cheat sheet here with some pricing now this is australian pricing that we're looking at here obviously there there are lots of different distributors around the world and we talked a little bit about that before how it's important to make sure you're getting one from a authorised distributor that you trust because the customer service experience you know it is completely reliant on who you buy it from basically so i mean having said that there is good support through the facebook group and the sim magic community on discord as well but we do have to remember that they are managed by the companies and i have seen instances where posts that they didn't like have been removed from the facebook group i haven't seen much in the discord but i mean i haven't been in the discord group long enough to notice it but i've been monitoring the facebook one for over a year now and i've seen a few instances where things have been deleted that they didn't like so you really do want to choose your distributor exactly yeah you need to be very careful of that if you're buying one of these and the pricing does vary quite a bit as well but i mean we need to put in perspective here and i mean really the the bases that we're comparing to here are obviously there's a sim magic m10 which comes in at 1 300 australian dollars and we are going to be talking australian dollars throughout here uh just so we can avoid the confusion around taxes and things like that if we keep it all the same again do your own research guys because prices will vary depending on where you are and you need to account for import taxes and duties and all those things as well so syn magic m10 1299 will say 1300 australian dollars this is way way way way smoother than the m10 is you never drove with the intended yeah so yeah casting my mind back to that one uh and i did have another driver one just a couple of months ago now when we did the revised review that is quite grainy all the time so the details are good the fidelity is good it's not as strong as this i never found the strength with the m10 at 10 newton meters to be too weak for me really it was about right at its maximum setting but people that are stronger than me like you would probably want a little bit more out of the m10 so the m10 is a base that i could see you kind of outgrowing and potentially wanting to upgrade from down the track whereas this is something that i think you would probably commit to and probably not feel the need to upgrade again unless there was some big advancement in technology like some new force feedback technology or you know something like that some really compelling reason to upgrade again from this so i would definitely say if you have the money and you're kind of going is it worth the extra over this in magic n10 this is 2 000 australian dollars 15 newton meters m10 is 1300 australian dollars at some 10 newt meters whether or not it's worth the extra money it is quite a lot of extra money but the build quality is significantly higher um you know and the quality of the force feedback overall is significantly higher as well so i would say if you have the money then yes this is the better buy out of the m10 and the and the alpha simply because of the fact that you're probably not going to want to upgrade it again but it sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun with an m10 absolutely yeah there's nothing wrong fundamentally with an m10 either it's just this is better yeah yeah so you know if you can afford it then i would say go for it rather than taking the baby stepping probably wanting to upgrade down the track but then we also have to consider what else we can get for the price and i think this is where it starts to get a little bit more you know difficult to judge because we did have some problems i mean we had issues with firmware upgrades not working same problems that we had with the m10 there um we had issues with the steering alignment being off and having to over calibrate it to get it to sit straight so it wasn't even a matter of just kind of going in setting it straight and then hitting go it was having to adjust it and then going back into the game to see if it was actually straight in the game and it was different between different games as well yeah yeah so i think i think dirt rally and iracing were the only ones where it was actually straight every other title that we tested we had to tweak it to make it right so again if you're changing between sims all the time that is going to be frustrating it's not a major issue but it's something that you can save your preset for each game and you can save a preset but you know it is it's still working it's still something oh i'm going to do this again for someone like me i'm a much more casual gamer than than you are yeah that's a real detraction frustrating yeah yeah frustrating thing so again when you when you look at it and you know little things like that that i don't think should be a problem for the money now you know admittedly that's not a hardware issue that is all software stuff now i think about every single negative point that i've had about this really comes down to the software integration and you know the filters and things like that i think that the hardware itself is actually very good um i didn't really have any issues with the hardware at all i think i think the quick release is fantastic i think it's one of the best ones on the market it just works and it works well um you know there hasn't been any hints really of any problems with it over the year that i've been monitoring the brand so i yeah i don't see any reason not to say it's a great quick release and another thing to mention is with the quick release you're not getting the same flex that you do in the dd that is that is a very good point actually yeah and i'd actually forgotten about that but yes the the dd i mean some people say that they don't have any flex with them my personal experience i've had two dd2s now and your dd1 and you know i've seen plenty of other reviews and it seems more common than not that people do have that bit of flex yeah in the uh in the stem between the wheel and the quick release or the stem on the wheelbase and that is not a problem and again that's something that's going to really annoy some people having netflix and other people's no it doesn't really bother me yeah i mean i don't really notice it when i'm driving either but you can't deny the fact that this is a better thing this is a better quick release than the fnatic one is it's as simple as that yeah definitely yeah i did notice the bass got quite warm compared to anything else that i've ever tested even running at it's sort of 70 percent load yeah okay not hot problematically not problematically warm no but i did notice it got a little bit warmer so there's that just to note but when you start to really compare it to what else we have on the market at a similar price point so here in australia at least we have the vrs direct force pro which we reviewed a couple of weeks ago and that is 1500 australian dollars around around the 1 500 australian dollar mark landed with all the with all the associated costs that we have in australia now again of course that price is going to vary depending on where you are in the world but that is you know 25 percent cheaper than this is and i'd say comparing this against the dd1 which is close price point wise and the simicube 2 sport which is a little bit more expensive but relatively close as well this is closer to the vrs direct force pro in terms of its force feedback quality yeah than the than the other ones are but it's 25 more expensive so it's like well yeah where's the value in this over the direct force pro i don't really see it i mean you do have the quick release whereas with the direct force pro you will have to buy a quick release on top of that uh you do have the good quality cinematic wheels as well which you can choose from and they are good wheels but they are quite expensive now well no we just had a look at that before and as a bundle at least again here in australia as a bundle to buy the alpha which is two thousand dollars with the gt1 wheel which is this one it's 2500 so this is basically 500 on top uh with the gt4 it's 2800 so you know and it is a really solid feel it's a nice solid it's very nice thing but i mean the the analog shifters on the the analog paddles on the back aren't fantastic they do have that little squeaky yeah they've got to squeak and you you know they just and we reviewed these wheels previously so check out those videos yeah but i mean that's that's normal for magnetic shifters so i don't think that's really a negative i think these must be particularly loud ones i don't think they are not compared to i mean the asha racing wheel is way louder than that yeah so yeah i mean it's metal on metal contact but yeah yeah they are loud i mean i guess the closest things here are if we take a dd1 which is 1900 and then pair it with a bmw gt2 wheel which is about the same kind of quality wise as this maybe this is slightly nicer but not a whole lot in it um that would come out at twenty four hundred dollars australian so a hundred dollars cheaper not a big difference than this with that yeah and then say for example if we wanted a formula wheel so we took the dd1 and paired it with a formula v2 that would be about 2500 as well so the same price as this pair with this but 2 800 paired with this guy but then you also have to factor in that that doesn't have analog paddles so you want to add on the advanced paddle module on top of that which is another but then you can also look at the mclaren gt as well which i mean is a big step down in quality to this definitely but ergonomically functionality-wise i kind of prefer it to be honest but for my hands at least yeah i love that so yeah so i mean look there are a lot of options there and you do also have to factor in as well that personally i prefer the fnatic ecosystem i mean the software is obviously a lot more refined than it is with sim magic and jumping into different titles jumping into different titles switching between profiles updating firmware's a lot easier now as well with the latest update they've got that firmware manager software which we need to take a look at actually on the channel so yeah look i mean overall fnatic does have the upper hand when it comes to two things i think the ecosystem and just the overall detail and fidelity in the force feedback but they do lose out on the overall smoothness compared to this yeah so then we compare with this simicube2 sport which comes in at 2200 australian dollars so a little bit more expensive 17 newton meters but i think the difference between 17 and 15 is negligible i don't think anybody's really going to notice that that doesn't have its own branded wheels simicube don't sell their own wheels just yet so we are limited to aftermarket wheels only so that kind of makes things a little bit more tricky to compare there um when we did the vrs direct force pro review a couple of weeks ago we actually asked the community what would be some of your recommendations for wheels and there was a whole bunch of really good suggestions yeah throughout a large range of price points so i'd recommend go watch that review and check out check out the comments there because there's a bunch of suggestions there but i mean you know if you were to pair sc2 sport with say an ash erasing f28sc or a cubecontrols formula pro or something like that it is going to be a lot more expensive and that is probably the closest you're going to get quality wise to what these are they are better quality than these i think but they're you know relatively close and it is going to be quite a lot more expensive the main differences i felt between the se2 sport and this is just in that finer refined detail i think overall the smoothness and you know the feeling of weight transfer and traction loss is very very very close with this the only difference there would be just i think the slew rate is slightly lower on this motor so it doesn't snap quite as quickly it's not quite so responsive but it is very very close and i think you would struggle to feel the difference there in a blind test but where it does feel quite significantly different is just in that finer detail that we're talking about before so look in its own right for me at least i think it's a very good wheelbase hardware wise i think it's great i think they do have some some way to go in terms of the software and firmware side of things but i mean yeah look when you compare it to other options that are on the market it does become a little bit more of a difficult sell i think if you can find one of these for a similar price to a vrs direct force pro then it is definitely worth trying to get your hands on both and testing them for yourselves i think you know direct force pro wins out slightly on the feeling of the force feedback just in that finer detail once again but the overall smoothness and refinement is very very similar obviously this has the advantage of the quick release the ecosystem with the wheels and everything like that it is a more compact more refined and cleaner package as well it integrates so nicely into your vehicle it does integrate very nicely getting your monitor right up to the back here without plugs in the way those kind of things it's really nice yeah so it is a really nice product and i mean you can see where you know where the money is and it's certainly not a cheap feeling product at all i mean it's very high quality so no problems at all there and you might just really love these rooms and want these rooms in which case it's a great option already yeah i mean you can use these rims plugged in via usb as well but i think really where the value for money is is how it integrates is how it integrates through the bluetooth connection and that does work very well we didn't have any problems with dropouts or anything like that at all so yeah i mean compared to the vrs direct force pro i think it is a tough one i think there are pros and cons in both camps but when it comes down to the raw quality of the force feedback i do think the vrs does have the slight upper hand you do have to consider the price difference there as well depending again on where you live so compared with the phonetic dd1 this does come in at 100 more expensive and 5 newton meters less dynamic range so to speak again i don't think most people are going to feel the difference in overall strength i think that most people are going to probably end up around that sort of 10 newton meter mark anyway so i don't think that's really a selling point i wouldn't choose the dd1 over this purely because it has that extra five newton meters again where it comes down to for me is just the value that you place in that ecosystem you have more of an abundance of choice when it comes to ecosystem friendly rims with the fnatic as well and it does have that little bit more detail but you do have that underpinning graininess and notchy kind of effect for me i would go the detail in those road textures over the smoothness okay yes some people may not agree with that some people may prefer the smoothness but for me it is it is close yeah but i think for me i i value that ecosystem and also the fact that you know the fnatic one just works with every single sim you just plug it in it just goes you don't have to stuff around with many adjustments you know they're very it's very uniform between different sim titles as well and that's something that we've harped on about in a lot of our wheelbase reviews you know if you're a person that jumps in and out of different sims all the time and wants a pretty consistent experience between them then fnatic i think does better than anybody else does in that space the vrs wasn't as good in that regard symbicubism is good in that regard either although they are getting closer but yeah i think that you know if those are the things that are important to you then the fanatic is probably the better choice there and then we look at the simicube2 sport at 2200 that is quite a big step up when you look at the cost of rims that kind of provide the same quality as this as well that are compatible you could use these rims on the simi cube and i have actually done that with the gt1 room before connected via usb with the sim magic you do have the advantage of the fully powered wireless quick release system which you don't get with the sim cube you have to rely on rechargeable or replaceable batteries that's never really been a problem for me you just kind of recharge the wheel once every couple of weeks or you know replace the battery once every few years and it's fine but you know i think that that is something that does bother some people and i do when i when i'm being completely honest prefer the fact that this is completely powered and wireless you just plug it in and it just goes i think that that is pretty cool so that is one thing to consider there but i think overall you know for the money the simicub2 sport does provide the better overall driving experience so i guess ultimately for me what it boils down to is i don't have any reason not to recommend the sim magic alpha i think it's a really great wheelbase and you know really nice quality hardware wise no real problems at all to speak of i just think that there are some other options out there that are perhaps slightly better value for money that provide a slightly better ecosystem or a slightly better driving experience and it's really going to boil down to what's most important to you and what kind of value you can get where you live as well but i do think that it's important once again to just highlight for you guys that might have skipped to the end of this video that all the problems that we had and when i say all the problems we didn't have that many problems but all the little concerns that we had with it were all things that were around the software side of things i think the hardware itself is really fantastic and i think if they can really nail those little things in the software down fix up the firmware upgrading process and maybe add a couple of those missing filters that we missed from the simicube side particularly the static force reduction filter that was something that we nitpicked in the vrs direct force pro review as well and i think that you know both of these wheelbases this and the direct force pro would be a whole lot better if they did have that static force reduction filter because that would mean you could bring up those other details a little bit more without sort of being overloaded with the cornering forces so so that seems to be the kind of thing that they might be adding in the near future well i mean i don't know i don't know but i mean what i guess the point here is that it's a software thing could be done so there's no reason why if you were to purchase one of these today you couldn't have a way better driving experience you know further down the track and it's also important to remember how bad the fnatic dd1 and dd2 were when they were first released they were horrible when i first plugged in my dd2 what is this i hated it i didn't like it as much as my clubspot wheelbase 2.5 it wasn't until i updated to the more recent firmware and i talked about this in the review when i put the new firmware on it it was a completely different experience and there's no reason why the same thing can't happen with this as well so i think it's very important to call that out so you can't promise that we can't promise it no but there's no reason to believe that it can't be done that's the point so this isn't a bad buy it's just right at this very point in time i believe that there are better options with better driving experiences for similar or slightly cheaper so that's what you need to consider so that's what it boils down to for me guys hopefully you found the review interesting and useful if you have as always hit the thumbs up button and consider subscribing as well so you don't miss future videos big thank you once again to simrix.com as well for sending this gear out to us to review you can check them out in the description link down below as well thank you guys very much for watching and we'll see you again soon see ya bye so you

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 46,812

Rating: 4.8959689 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ZK9Ed0Tl2G0

Length: 93min 25sec (5605 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AllezCannes]

Thanks for sharing Will - Regarding their QR piece do you know if it only works with their system? I'm curious whether it can be used with something else like the VRS Direct Force Pro DD.