Turtle Beach VelocityOne Race - The Complete Review

hey guys will here so I'm really excited for today's video it's not every day that you get to check out a Brand's first attempt at a Sim racing product but that's exactly what we're going to be doing today this is the Turtle Beach velocity One race package which includes a 7.2 newm direct drive wheelbase a removable interchangeable steering wheel three pedal load cell brake pedal set and integrated button box so it certainly seems at least on paper like a lot of value for money but of course looks can certainly be deceiving so what we're going to be doing today is unpacking all of this for you guys showing you as much Det to as we possibly can so you can decide whether this might be the Sim racing product for you so let's get started okay so there's a lot of stuff to get through today as you can see but firstly some important information so you have the full context of exactly what we're doing today so firstly a big thank you to Turtle Beach for sending this gear across to us to check out now I actually reached out to the Australian marketing agency that they deal with so I haven't actually spoken with Turtle Beach directly most of these companies have an agency that they deal with with this kind of stuff through so I reached out to the agency and organized for this to be sent across to us to check out not sure if they're going to ask for it back or not now I am hoping that we'll be able to hold on to it long term so we can cover product Evolution there are definitely a couple of things both on the hardware and the software side that I think certainly can be improved into the future and software should be as simple as things like firmware updates software updates and whatnot so I'm definitely Keen to cover that for you guys now we do have some affiliate links down in the description below we will be comparing this to a couple of other products in today's video as well so it's important that you know that all of those other products that we're comparing to were all provided to us under the same kinds of conditions as well and we have affiliate links for pretty much everything linked down in the description below so regardless of what you decide you want to pick up if anything uh that's an awesome way of helping support our work here at boosted media no additional cost to you that's just something that's available to you guys if you find what we do here of benefit and you want to help support us so we really do appreciate your support there but as is always the case we haven't had any words put in our mouth whatsoever this is purely just going to be my own observations and my own opinions having been testing this guy out for a couple of weeks now so let's dive in first of all talking about pricing so the Turtle Beach velocity One race package does genuinely give you everything that you need to get up and driving it includes an integrated table clamp the pedals do actually work quite well despite being load cell pedals on a floor as well so you don't necessarily need to have a SIM rig or any sort of cockpit or wheelstand to get up and driving with this a simple desk will do the job to get you up and driving with this thing and I think it's important to call that out right from the start here because with a lot of sim racing gear there are some Associated hidden costs if you really want to get into things so you ultimately end up needing to buy a wheel stand or needing to buy a separate table clamp or you know little little bits and pieces like that that can stack up over time whereas this genuinely gives you everything you need to get up and driving so the cost for this guy is $649 or $1,299 Australian including GST here in Australia so obviously check your local taxes shipping cost import duties and whatnot I believe this will also be sold through Amazon so we may see some fluctuations in pricing there and given Turtle Beach's presence in traditional bricks and mortar retail stores with their headsets I would imagine that we're probably going to see the these available on shelves as well and for that reason I think that it is going to be something that probably will sell quite well despite some of the shortcomings that we're going to be covering in today's video simply because at face value it does include a lot of things you've got the pedals you've got the button box you've got the integrated Dash you've got interchangeable steering wheels you know when you compare it to something like a g923 or some of the thrust Master gear that you would typically see in bricks and mortar retail remembering that other brands like fitech Sim magic Mozza for example don't tend to sell in shop front retail so a lot of people aren't even aware that they exist when they pick up something like this I think that this does have a lot of I guess you could call it shelf appeal so yeah it's a relatively aggressive price point uh there's a couple of different comparisons here that I've made just in my notes nothing really that directly competes with this other than just some of the fitech uh ready to race bundles now there's quite a few different configurations there and I would recommend we've got a we've got a fitech buyer guide that takes you through all the various different packages available and what we recommend what where the value is in terms of the various different steering wheels the different pedal sets that you can choose and uh different strengths in terms of the wheelbases as well so it is a pretty comprehensive ecosystem that fitech have around this kind of price range that does give you an abundance of choice when it comes to exactly what you're wanting out of your Racing Experience so definitely do your own research there but if you looking for a comparable kind of package that gives you everything you need to get up and driving with the exception of a table clamp which is an additional cost uh with a fatech ready to race bundle those start at around the kind of $500 Mark uh for the 8 newon m wheelbases which are comparable strength to this at 7.2 new M but without a load cell brake pedal but out of the ready to race bundles might pick at around the same kind of newtonmeter strength as what we have here with a load cell break would be the McLaren Elite bundle which does come with a CSL Elite V2 pedals and the boost kit so gives you 8 newon Meers of strength out of the wheelbase and that comes in at $799 so it is a little bit more expensive than what we have here as we get on through today's video I'll explain some of the differences in the Driving Experience between those pack packages just so you get a better understanding of what might best suit you and why I feel the way I do about this particular product and what it represents in terms of value now most of the other comparable Sim racing Hardware that's available out there does ultimately end up being quite a bit more expensive than what this is when you factor in all those additional costs so things like having to buy pedals separately having to buy clamps and whatnot so a couple of examples just to give you an idea here the thrust Master t818 which is 10 newm direct drive wheelbase unfortunately we haven't actually tested one of those so I can't comment on how it Compares in terms of the driving experience but that is uh you're looking at $649 at the time that we're recording this obviously factoring taxes shipping costs and whatnot into your calculation there but that's uh yeah that's $649 so same price as this guy is but that doesn't come with a wheel or pedals so obviously that's going to end up ultimately being a lot more expensive you've got the Mozza R9 bundle as well which comes with a CS wheel we do have a review of both of those products right here on the channel if you want to check those out uh that bundle comes in at $999 uh as listed on their website again doesn't include pedals so that will be quite a significant additional cost and their shipping is quite expensive as well depending on where you buy it Mozza from so definitely pays to do your research in terms of different retailers for Mozza so again quite a bit more expensive than what you have here you then got the Logitech G Pro which is an 11 newm wheelbase that does come with a steering wheel there's then also the Logitech G Pro which is an 11 newm wheelbase does come with a steering wheel but not with pedals you buy the pedals separately I think you can buy them as a bundle but just for the base and wheel alone you're looking at around about $1,000 so again quite a lot more expensive than what you're getting here and the reason why I'm kind of elaborating on this is that I know for me at least in my mind when I saw this product those are the kinds of products that I was comparing it to and I kind of had to break outside of that outside of that mold a little bit and really kind of focus on the overall Driving Experience that we're getting from this compared to something like a Logitech g923 for example which is around about half the price of this package and really kind of look at what we're actually getting here in terms of value for money is this actually fundamentally better than something like a g923 and is it you know half as good as something that costs twice as much so that's the kind of framework that I'm placing this in in terms of a point of reference when we're talking about this now of course that's not an exhaustive list of all the various different Alternatives that are available out there that's just a couple of examples that I've picked that are things that I would personally consider if I was looking at something like this but as I said earlier I think regardless of the actual Driving Experience this probably will be quite a popular product just from people picking it up in traditional bricks and morar Retail so it'll be really interesting to see how those people actually rate the experience given that most of them will probably be either buying into SIM Racing for the very first time or upgrading from something like a Logitech g920 or g923 which this does give a superior Driving Experience too so that's where it sits in the market in terms of Price Point Let's dive into the hardware now and show you exactly what you're getting for your money so let's set the pedals aside to begin with and focus in on the steering wheel base and button box so as I mentioned in the intro the wheel is actually removable from the wheelbase so it does have a not standard style NRG quick release and the reason why I say not standard is because if you do try to use a Mozza or Sim magic wheel like this Sim magic Neo that we have here uh the diameter of the quick release is actually a little bit different so you can see here it kind of wobbles around on there and it has a completely different configuration of these retainer ball bearings that's actually slip into place over the collar so completely different quick release even though it looks very similar in design you're not going to be able to just interchange other wheels on here now I'm not 100% certain on how the wheel actually connects to the base in terms of the data throughput uh it does have five pins five little Pogo pins in the assembly here that you can see and those are basically spring-loaded little pins and those make contact with the positive and negative pads that we have here on the front of the quick release but there's no other Rings here for data transmission at all so that leads me to believe that there must be some sort of a wireless connection between the wheel and the wheelbase having said that we didn't notice any issues in terms of dropouts or lag or anything like that that would you know indicate any potential issue so yeah the experience there was absolutely fine but yeah we don't we don't know at this point they haven't shared anything in terms of a road map for other accessories it would be really cool if they released some sort of a hub adapter that allows you to just run any steering wheel that you wanted on the base I don't know whether it's going to be like fitech where they disable the force feedback if you don't have one of their wheels connected so those are all the kinds of things that we'll explore into the future I'm sure that at some point we'll see some aftermarket Hub adapters from companies like for example whose adapters we reviewed not long ago here on the channel and we're very impressed with but for now it is just the one wheel that you can use with this particular wheelbase so let's take a look at the wheel itself in more detail the quick release is actually absolutely fine there's a little bit of side to side movement in it as you can see in this footage here but look overall nothing really to complain about I'm quite happy with it it's nice and solid one thing I did notice is that you do have to actually pull the collar to put the wheel onto the base whereas a lot of other quick releases of this kind of style uh you can just push the wheel directly onto you can see this this wheel the um the retainer actually clicks into position when the wheel is disengaged from the quick release and then when you push the wheel onto the base it snaps back into position whereas with this guy you actually do need to pull the collar when you put the wheel onto the base which makes it a little bit more Awkward to mount but not a problem I would say the the flex in the quick release itself is probably or the it's probably not really Flex it's more play there's a little bit of movement little free play movement there um similar to the experience that you get with the old qr1 uh Club sport quick releases the metal quick releases from fitech but way way way less Flex than you get with the simplified qr1 the plastic composant quick releases there they had a lot more Flex overall so yeah just one thing to be aware of there if you are comparing against the fitech ready to race bundles that is one area of strength of this guy over those ones if you're getting a wheel that comes with the uh plastic simplified or plastic composite simplified quick release so just be aware of that uh flip the wheel around to the front now what exactly do we have here so 300 mm diameter with a d-shaped bottom now it is quite an aggressive d-shape you can see here in this footage now of me doing some drifting testing that it does tend to bounce around quite a lot in your hands I would much prefer given that this is the only steering wheel that they currently offer within this ecosystem if it were a round wheel I know a lot of people prefer this d-shaped wheel for particular types of driving does give you a little bit more clearance to your knees as well which may be important for some people in some contexts but in terms of overall versatility around wheel does tend to be much better in my opinion just because it's not going to be a problem for drifting or Rally or anything else but given 300 mm diameter it is very versatile in that regard makes it nice and easy to drive anything from your Formula 1 style cars all the way through to Drifting and rally style cars so as I always say my wheel reviews the smaller diameter the more Twitchy and uh more reactive the wheel tends to feel the larger the diameter the more muted and dampened the steering feels overall so if you go up to say like a 32 20 mm wheel on something like a Logitech g923 for example you'll notice that the steering feels a lot more vague than it does on a smaller wheel weight is also an important factor in that equation as well this particular Wheel by my measurement weighs in at 1.4 kg so not particularly light but certainly not the heaviest wheel that we've ever tested either it is quite nicely balanced overall it does sit nicely in the middle if you have it centered it doesn't try to rotate or do anything crazy like that now the reason why weight is important is because of rotating Mass so the more rotating Mass you have connected to a uh to wheelbase again the more dampened the more the more impact it's going to have on that Fidelity overall more of a more of a deal on weaker force feedback systems at 7.2 newm that we have here it feels absolutely fine with this wheel there's plenty of fidelity there in terms of the actual detail we'll get into force feedback and some of the shortcomings there later on when we dive more into the Driving Experience overall but uh yeah in terms of the sharpness and the detail that you're actually feeling I don't feel like the wheel has a large impact on that overall so some good design choices there overall with regards to diameter and weight I would prefer to see a round wheel just in terms of Versatility but otherwise okay now in terms of the materials used here the first thing I noticed when I picked this wheel up was that it's doesn't have any squish in the uh in the grip areas at all so it does it does just feel like it's hard plastic underneath this wrapping that they put on here now I don't think that it's leather or anything like that it certainly doesn't have a leather or even like a a pleather kind of smell to it it just feels like some sort of a PVC wrapping that they've put around and I did notice I don't know whether you'll be able to pick it up on camera but in the very corner there where the uh where it's wrapped around there is a little bit of uh wear on the grips so I mean it's too early to say yet we've only put maybe you know six or seven hours of usage into this so far so too early to tell whether there's any wear and tear on the grips just from regular usage but definitely let us know in the comments if you buy one of these wheels how it stands a test of time maybe jump back on the uh comments after 6 months or so and let us know cuz that's always a better test than what we can do here in the studio anyway but look the the the material itself feels okay I didn't have any issues with it feeling overly clammy or sweaty or anything like that but doesn't have any squish in the grips themselves if we quickly grab the fitech P1 wheel just note that I do have the qr2 light upgrade on this this normally would come with the qr1 simplified Which is far inferior to what we have on here look overall I mean if we put the two side by side you can see there's a lot more going on with the Turtle Beach wheel uh again this is included in bundles that are significantly cheaper than what the Turtle Beach is uh but don't come with load cell pedals either but look in terms of the overall material quality between the two the face plate design and whatnot I can see that uh Turtle Beach have probably actually had this in their sites when they were designing this and wanted to try and come out with something that was of comparable quality but maybe with a few more features than what we get with the fitech offering so the buttons and everything actually feel relatively similar I would say the fitech ones maybe feel a little bit better but there's really not a whole lot in it they are plastic touch points one thing I did notice is that when the back lighting as you'll see in the footage here is enabled on the on the wheel there is a little bit of uh bleed I guess you could call it on the sides of the buttons so I think that these buttons are just painted and maybe they haven't done the best job there some of the buttons were worse than others but look they do have quite a plasticky cheap feeling to them similar to what you'd find on say Logitech g923 for example so certainly not an upgrade in terms of the material quality and feel of the wheel in your hand compared to something like a g923 and those actually do have a leather wrapping on the on the wheel themselves as well but I mean this has got a rubberized grip material so it feels maybe a little tiny bit more Squishy in your hands but not really a huge difference between the two but yeah I mean you guys can see for yourselves there the materials that they've used throughout the wheels are very very similar to each other pretty much what you would expect for two packages that come in that are similar or at least comparable kind of price point give will take a few features as we'll get on through today's video but let's put that guy back aside again for now and talk a little bit more about what we have here in terms of input so we already briefly talked about the buttons on the face here so we also have some little toggle switches on the top on each side here as well so they look like normal thumb encoders that you'd find on any other wheel but you can see they're a spring-loaded mechanism that rotates in either direction now they are a uh cast aluminium of some of some variety material so they do theyve got a relatively okay feel to them again for the price point but I'm not a big fan of this spring-loaded mechanism I would much prefer to have a normal rotary encoder you do adapt to it when you're driving so you know if this is the first Sim racing wheel you've ever used you're probably not going to know the difference to be honest but for me having used a lot of rotary encoda style wheels I do much prefer that approach but look it's got a decent action to it with or without gloves absolutely fine you're not going to find that you're accidentally making adjustments that you don't intend to do so that is absolutely fine you also have a rotary encoder and a four-way hat switch down the bottom as well so that guy doesn't have any push button functionality and again that is a cast aluminum dial there and then a plastic hat on the switch here so you got left and right on your rotary encoder and then you've got left right up down but no push button on the little hat switch there you've then got another rotary switch and two buttons on the left hand side that is exclusively used for navigating through the various different menus on the wheelbase as you'll see later on so not something that you can map inside the game whether you're on Xbox or PC that is the case so that is everything you have in terms of inputs on the front of the wheel it's actually isn't as feature Rich as it perhaps looks at a glance once you break it down but look all the basics are definitely there otherwise on the face of the wheel is plastic construction throughout here you can see the giant Turtle Beach logo in the middle here which seems to be a bit of a theme with these uh with these kinds of wheels at this kind of price point if you look at the fitech GT DD extreme and the GTD Pro they both have a similar kind of thing going on as well I'm not a big fan of it personally but that's just my subjective opinion let us know in the comments down below what you think but they're done quite a nice job here with the faux carbon fiber finish so this is just an injection molded plastic that's got a texture to it but it looks relatively you know genuine it looks like carbon fiber at a glance at least so I think they've done a relatively good job there a nice little uh metal inlay there with the Turtle Beach logo on it as well I think they could have done without this button and just gone with the logo there I think that would look a lot more classy again that's just my opinion but then if we flip the wheel around uh on the back here we have our magnetic shifter paddles now you can see if if Tom can get in there with the camera you can see the little neodymium magnet that sits up there look honestly the magnets don't feel like they're doing anything for these shifters if I compare that to the feeling of the shifters that we have on the P1 wheel from fitech these are reverberating through the casing of the wheel a little bit more than what we have on the total Beach so when we click it you feel a kind of vibrations through the wheel which does give it a bit of a cheap feeling overall but the actual action to shifting is a little bit more positive a little bit more intentional with with the P1 wheel and there's less Flex overall in these paddles although there is still a considerable amount of flex there as you can see so I mean they're not fantastic feeling shifters but they're adequate for the price point on this wheel and I would say the same for this wheel really relatively Snappy there but you can see if I if I get into that there's a lot of flex there so whether or not that is acceptable for the price point all other things considered considering that you're getting a dash a button box a load cell pedal I'll let you guys decide for yourselves it is what it is but you can see there's quite a lot of flex there on both sides now another thing that we did notice with this particular wheel too and you can see it right now that shifter is now actually stuck in so if I pull it it sticks there and then I tap it again and it releases once it gets a bit of a few cycles of usage into it it does seem to loosen up again you can see now it's uh yeah it's sticking maybe like 30% of the time but definitely a uh definitely a quality control issue there one thing I did notice is uh this this box had actually been previously opened uh it did still have the factory seals on it you can see in this footage here we did remove the factory seal from the back of the quick release so I don't think that they'd actually driven with this before sending it to us but it certainly wasn't completely Factory sealed like what you would find at retail so that leads me to believe that somebody probably did actually check this before they sent it to us and uh missed the fact that that was sticking you can see it's come loose again now and it's fine but yeah so yeah definitely not something that you want to encounter with your shifters and hopefully nobody else has that problem but again if you do buy one of these let us know in the comments if you have a similar issue there we do have a couple of analog paddles on the wheel as well which is something we don't see on the P1 if you've got a Keen Eye uh these aren't as functional as you get on a lot of other wheels and wheelbases so you can't use them as a bite Point clutch for example there's no adjustment there for the bite Point as you can see in the footage of the settings here there are a couple of options with regards to how you can map these but the important thing to understand here is that it doesn't actually recognize these paddles as an entirely separate axis in your sim so if you have it in clutch mode for example it binds it to the same input as a clutch on your pedal so when you push the clutch paddle on the wheel or the clutch on your pedals it does exactly the same thing so you're not actually able to map it as a completely separate device so you have the option of clutch throttle brake or uh handbrake and although they don't have a handbrake accessory available yet I would assume that if they do release one it probably is going to end up working the same way so you're not going to be able to have two separate axes for your wheel and your physical handbrake inside the Sim now I don't know whether that's just the limitation of the Xbox comp ability I know there are limited number of inputs on Xbox but that's the way it works so just want to make sure that you guys aware of that but the analog paddles they got an okay feeling to them similar amount of flex as what we had on the shifters I'd say it's probably a little bit more forgivable on the analog paddles than it is on the shifters because they're not something that you you kind of they're not something that you rely on for immersion as much as what you do with shifters that you using all the time but they got a relatively good action plenty of movement there and I I had these mapped to my hand hand breake for when I was drifting in aeta Corsa for example and when I did a bit of rally driving and it worked absolutely fine did what it needed to do so I don't think anybody's going to have an issue with those for the price point and if you've got a Keen Eye you may also notice that there is an RSB and an LSB button on the back here as well which are mappable on the PC or uh will map as LSB and RSB if you are in Xbox mode on your Xbox and I think that's everything to cover in terms of the wheel itself so let's move over onto the wheelbase now so this is a bit of a mixed bag and I feel like the main shortcomings with the wheelbase are actually more in the software and firmare integration than the hardware itself the hardware itself actually seems to be of relatively good quality you can see some uh some shots here of the internals as we go through it you can see the motor inside there is like a sealed unit and then they mount that motor inside the assembly here and give it this fancy looking casing which makes it look a little bit uh a little bit more toy like in my opinion for me personally I prefer to just have a motor on my rig that's small and concealable but you know not everybody thinks that way and that's absolutely fine they're obviously targeting a certain type of Market with this particular product but look it's a direct drive Bas 7.2 newm of peak torque but I would say that it feels a little bit weaker noticeably weaker than the CSL DD does at its 8 newm with the Boost pack so we already talked about the quick release in a little bit of detail this is a CNC machined aluminium uh Hub that we have here on the face of the motor and yeah it does what it needs to do well enough I'd say and I do definitely like the fact that they have chosen to give us an interchangeable wheel system here very excited to see what they come out with in the future in terms of other wheels that will work with this wheelbase and hopefully they come out with some sort of a hub adapter that lets you use your own third party Wheels I think they'll be missing out on a whole segment of the market if they don't do something like that because there's a lot of people that just want to run a vanilla wheel from eBay or whatever for drifting and whatnot and uh you know probably aren't going to want to run something like this for the reasons that we discussed previously so what else do you need to know about the wheelbase as a piece of Hardware obviously we'll get into the actual Driving Experience later on today uh so you got a 30° angle on the wheel which isn't adjustable so that means that if you have the wheel sitting on a flat table the wheel is sitting at a 30° tilt that worked absolutely fine for me and was comfortable with this thing mounted on a desk for a Sim rig if you're mounting it in that scenario you may find that you run into some limitations depending on your particular rig with being able to tilt it far enough forward to get the angle right obviously there's a lot of variables there with regards to the wheel position relative to the seat and whatnot but 30° I think is a good choice it would have maybe been nice to see the ability to adjust that some but that introduces the opportunity for flex and a point of failure and whatnot so I I wouldn't say that it's a bad decision to have a fixed angle like what we have here is pretty Universal among most products of this kind of design I would say so integrated table Mount down the bottom here you can actually see these two metal legs here which actually wind out so we'll show you some footage here of actually mounting it on the table basically these two little wings fold up you got two large bolts which allow you to wind in and wind out those uh those legs and then it actually comes inside the little pouch here with a little Allen key tool with the appropriate Allen key for making adjustments there and a second one here as well which I haven't actually found a use for so far but uh I'm sure somebody in the comments will let me know exactly what that one's for so that sits in the little pouch here so you don't lose it it does tend to Rattle around quite nastily though so I would recommend maybe tucking that away somewhere else and hiding out of place but as you can see here in the footage mounting this on the table relatively easy to do they just wind out it's a little bit cumbersome to kind of get in there and twist a little bit more clumsy I would say than the mounting system you have with say a Logitech g923 or whatever but does have the advantage of being able to clamp in much harder with the Allen key as opposed to plastic legs and it is a fully metal design there as well so we didn't have any issues with the thing bouncing around or moving or sliding or anything like that on our particular setup with the 7.2 newon meters of strength that we have here so I would say in conclusion there the uh the mounting system works absolutely fine if you have a Keen Eye you may have also noticed the standard mounting pattern that we have on the bottom down here as well I believe that that is the same as what you would find on the older belt driven uh thrust Master wheelbases if I'm not mistaken it's been a long time since I've looked at one of them to be honest with you but either way uh all the rigs that we had here that had mounting patterns for Logitech and uh and thrustmaster also were compatible with this so we didn't have to drill any holes which is a sensible Choice we've seen a couple of new brands come into the uh the Sim racing space and come out with their own mounting pattern which is different from every other brand and of course then it takes a while for the cockpit and wheelstand manufacturers to catch up with that and start offering those those hole patterns so I think it's sensible to copy somebody else's design in that regard I wish there was actually like a standardized system for whole patterns that everybody can form to so we didn't have to have these wheel plates that have a million holes in them it would just make everything a lot easier I'm sure everybody would agree so whether you're hard mounting or table mounting this thing absolutely no issues with flex that we ran into whatsoever at the 7.2 NM of strength that this guy offers now in terms of inputs and outputs we have our standard Xbox buttons on the face of the wheelbase here exactly the same as what you would find on your Xbox controller and then on the side we've got a power button and a k drive button which allows us to make some adjustments to the force feedback which we'll get into a little bit later you'll also notice on the side here a USB port for connecting our button box which we are going to talk about in a lot of detail in just a moment there's also a headphone and uh microphone Jack here as well so it's a standard 3.5 mil uh Stereo Plus microphone Jack and the software itself which is built into the base does have a couple of cool options as you can see here for making adjustments to your balance your EQ even and I did actually find that to be quite useful it's quite convenient to be able to go into the menu system make those kinds of adjustments on the Fly and not something that we've ever seen on any other SIM racing Hardware that I can think of in the past before so I thought that was quite a nice little inclusion there if we spin the base around as well quickly too just to give you a look at what we have on the back here we've got our standard power jack we've got our USBC input and then two USBC connections for peripheral so our pedals actually do connect via this nice braided cable directly to one of those either one of those is fine uh obviously when they release further accessories into the future assuming that they will those will connect through that interface as well now it doesn't operate as a standard USBC interface so you can't just connect a webcam or some other brand directly to the base unfortunately but it is nice to see a USBC connection there one thing I did appreciate is the fact that the connections themselves are slightly recessed into the base as well so the plug that you have on here sits nicely in there and uh you know it protects it a little bit so that it comes out straight if you step on the cable it's going to kind of pull it out straight rather than uh rather than damaging that connector so a nice little touch there in terms of the power supply a nice small little package here a relatively short cable on the uh on the power supply itself I measured it at about a meter and a half on this particular example and uh it was just that tiny little bit too short on our particular simri to sit comfortably on the ground with cable management so I would like them to to increase the length of that cable to maybe two two and a half meters that was one small little nitpick but look in terms of the power supply it is a uh 24v DC 5 amp or 120 W output on this and it is just a standard DC uh Jack style connector with a little pin internally and then the sleeve around the outside so nothing particularly special there it is a completely passive device there's no cooling fans or anything like that inside the power supply uh and that is everything I think you need to see in terms of the base itself so let's move on now let's talk about this button box this is where I was quite uh quite disappointed for reasons that will become obvious very quickly so the first issue that I have with this button box is uh the amount of flex that it has look when you're pressing the buttons the thing just does have an awful lot of flex which just kind of ruins the immersion I mean one of one of the things that you want with a button box is to you know you want it to pull you into the experience of driving a race car you want it to feel like you're in a race race car and when you've got a flimsy thing that's just rocking around like this it just it just completely ruins that experience entirely in my opinion at least anyway so whether it's one of the buttons that you're pressing or a rotary encoder or even this pretty funky missile switch that we have here which also does have a little Illumination in the front as well it just isn't a great experience and like I mean I just again I have to put it in the context of you know all the things that you're getting for the price point but it's not a cheap piece of hardware at the end of the day and that does stand out to me as something that uh just doesn't give you the same level of experience that you have Elsewhere on the hardware so definitely something that I think they should improve upon or maybe revise for another version later on now the other issue that I have with the button box as well is the uh is the actual integration when it comes to the buttons now there's two issues that I have with this in terms of functionality one of those is very very major and that is the fact that these two buttons up here the start and stop buttons are actually uh to turn on and turn off off the wheelbase so you would think that you would be able to map the engine start and engine stop button to those functions inside your sim at least for PC users that was that's generally what you would expect on any other button box right just kind of makes sense that way but no this turns on the wheelbase that's okay but if you accidentally touch that button even just momentarily it actually switches off the wheelbase entirely and there were multiple instances where I was trying to uh make adjustments to this particular rotary encoder here and accidentally bumped that guy with with gloves on and Switched Off the wheelbase and you know depending on the Sim racing title that you're driving you may actually have to completely quit out of the game for it to reconnect again afterwards so that is to me one of the signs that this is a company that's new to sim racing and look honestly I'm just surprised that this made it through to production at all I'm sure that if they'd consulted with the majority of sim Racers prior to production on this most of you guys probably would highlight that as an issue and something that should change before we reach production so that is definitely one thing that was a big a big turnoff for this particular button box but also just in terms of mapping again it kind of makes more sense on Xbox than it does on PC you can see here for each of the buttons you can assign it to a specific function either on the wheelbase itself so adjusting settings pertaining to the uh to the software on the wheelbase or the firmware on the wheelbase or you can map those two functions on the Xbox controller in the context of a PC you are very limited in what you can do here so you can't just map every single button to whatever button press you want inside the game like what you would with a conventional button box uh you are limited to the functions that they actually stipulate that you can assign them to so a little bit of a frustration there we were able to assign a couple of the encoders to just whatever button we wanted the last complaint that I have about this button box is these toggle switches that we have down the bottom here are actually double throw switches so they have a middle position a lower position and an upper position but in every instance that I could find at least only the upper position is actually mappable to any function whether it be through the functions built into the wheelbase the Xbox controller as you're describing earlier or in your sim racing title the downward movement doesn't appear to actually have any function at all so I have no idea why they've done that maybe it's something some sort of functionality that they're going to add later on maybe I'm missing something but I I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure that out and wasn't able to to do so but there are obviously single throw toggle switches available on the market so I just don't see the reason why they with a double throw switch for something that only has a single throw function but that is a button box very underwhelming overall you can see how thin that little mounting bracket is there and it just has an unacceptable even for the price point I would say an unacceptable amount of flex and it's just a very very very underwhelming experience overall so lastly with regards to the wheelbase we need to talk about the integrated 5 in by my measurement display now they don't give us the resolution or the actual dimensions of the screen at all in the literature but I measured it to be uh 5 in but look it is a nice vibrant display here uh and look it's responsible for a couple of different things I think the the thing that you need to be aware of here is that it's kind of similar to what we see with fitech tuning menu system so it's capable of displaying Telemetry out of the game as well as giving you the ability to make adjustments to the settings as you guys have seen as we've been progressing through today's video in a little bit of detail already so when you push these buttons down on the wheel down here so you got the scroll wheel that basically brings up the menu that you see here and then you've got a back button and a select button here which allows you to make those selections as you're going through so you basically got a bunch of different icons here that allow you to make adjustments to each particular setting now we could go through every single setting here and explain exactly what everything does but thankfully Turtle Beach have actually got a really good document on their support website it was a little bit difficult to find but I've linked it down in the description below for you guys so if you are genuinely looking at buying one of these wheels uh I would recommend click on that link down in the description below have a look at that it's going to take you through every single setting and adjustment that you have available on this base at least at the time that we're making this video and I'm hoping that they'll keep that document updated if they do make any firmer adjustments as well so with that in mind what I want to do is kind of just talk you through the experience of using this overall cuz I think that's probably where the value is in the uh in the context of a video like this so using a little scroll wheel here we navigate through the various different menu items and then basically we select each one to drill in and make adjustments to those particular settings one of the things that I really like about it is that you do have multiple profiles that you can set so just like what we have within the fitech ecosystem which has always been a really strong selling point for them you can set up different profiles for different cars or even different Sims and then quickly change between them using the wheel without having to alt Tab and go across into software now I should also mention that there is a pretty complete software package available for PC which allows you to make all the same adjustments that you see on here as well doesn't really give you access to any settings in and above what you can do through the wheelbase which I actually think is is a good thing and look overall I actually think it is a cleaner implementation overall than what we have with fitech ecosystem just simply because you've got one software package that deals with everything whereas with fitech you've got their you've got their driver software and then you have fanalab which sits on top of that as another layer there's a little bit more functionality actually quite a lot more functionality in the fitech ecosystem as you'll see a little bit later on when we talk about driving but in terms of just accessibility and ease of use this is a lot more similar to what you see with the g923 and the G Pro from logic Tech if you're familiar with those and again you can check out our reviews of both of those products if you want to learn more about those but very approachable very simple to use not overwhelming in any regard and I would say it's a very similar experience both using the integrated Dash as well as the software there is also a smartphone app available as well which allows you in theory to make the same kinds of adjustments that you can from the wheelbase too but uh we weren't actually able to get that working we were able to get it to connect to the wheelbase but it just didn't seem to really have any functionality at all other than just switching between profiles which we couldn't get get to work anyway so not sure exactly what the deal is with that but you don't really need it anyway cuz you can do everything from the wheel which I think is really nice so while overall I would say that it is a nice clean integration it is a little bit clumsy sometimes there's a couple of little quirks just things like adjusting the wheel sensitivity for example so if you want to adjust the sensitivity you've got to scroll this little wheel here and it doesn't sense whether you're uh trying to go a long way or a little way so it goes in 10° increments from uh whatever the minimum value you want so say 320° for example all the way up to 2600 de for truck Sims but if you want to change that you've got to go round round round round round round round round round for like a minute and a half to get all the way up there now of course because we have those profiles you could just set up a truck Sim profile and switch to that profile so not a major issue but just little I guess uh UI tweaks that they could make to improve the experience overall but I do love the fact that everything is so nicely integrated here now they do also as part of the package as well of course have telemetry built into a couple of different dashes uh which you can see here on the display as well so there's three separate dashes that you have by default they may expand upon that into the future there's a secondary software package which you can install which pulls the Telemetry data in from the Sim title that you're running or you can also pull that data in through simhub as well but it's important to understand that while it does integrate with simhub in terms of pulling Telemetry in for the integrated dashes You Can't customize the dashes through simhub like you can with many third party dashes or even a smartphone or tablet so look I think in terms of the display itself it's a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none personally in terms of the core functionality that we have here and the ability to make adjustments I don't find it any cleaner or any easier to use than the fitech tuning menu is despite obviously being a much bigger display I think the fitech tuning menu and the way they've been able to make that work on such a tiny little 1-in display or even a 3x7 segment display is what we have on their cheaper Wheels is actually pretty pretty darn genius I mean it's been around for a very long time now and I haven't seen anything that really is better than it and I was hoping that maybe this might be like wow this is incredible but in practice it kind of just does the same thing but you don't actually have as many adjustments to the force feedback that you can do through the software whether it's through the wheel or through the PC software or the smartphone as you do on pretty much any other direct drive wheelbase with the exception of Logitech maybe so uh we'll talk about that again when we get into the driving experience in just a minute so yeah look I mean when you consider the fact that you can't really do anything in terms of settings other than just the audio thing that we talked about earlier on this then what you can do with a fitech smaller display and the fact that you are a lot more limited with the dashboard functionality that you have here compared to something like a smartphone or tablet or you know a dedicated display device look for me yeah bit of a jack of all trades master of none I would say with regards to that personally I would prefer to have a dedicated display on my wheel like what we have with fitech that's just for displaying basic Telemetry and then have a separate dashboard whether it be like an old smartphone that you have laying around or a tablet or something like that that you can use to run with simhub and that way you can customize it make it look however you want and uh you just get a lot more versatility and functionality overall that way now of course with Xbox that's not always an option so this does work quite well in that context and look ultimately it's it is a very subjective thing I don't want to keep on repeating that over and over but look it it does what it does relatively well I just don't think that it's quite the selling point for this particular ecosystem over others that i' perhaps hoped that it might be I think that's probably the best way that I can describe that so that is a quick rund down on the dash again do reference that document that takes you through all the settings and adjustments that you can make there if you're wanting to get more information on that I would definitely recommend if you are genuinely looking at purchasing one of those have a read of that so you have a better understanding of exactly what you can and can't do with this particular wheelbase so what I want to do now is move across to the pedals and then we'll get into the Driving Experience overall and talk a little bit more about the adjustments that we have available with the force feed back on this guy as well because that is another area of significant Improvement let's just say so we'll set these guys aside and let's take a look at the pedals so let's talk about these pedals now and these are honestly a mixed bag there's some things that I really like about what they've done here and there's some things that I definitely think can be significantly improved even at this kind of price point so let's go through this methodically now with a focus on the experience of actually using the pedals so you've got a plastic for the most part base plate here which does actually work quite well on carpet or mounted to rig so we've got a hole pattern on the bottom here which I'm not 100% sure whether it's a standard hole pattern or not but uh we're able to mount it relatively easily on a Next Level racing rig with two separate uh panels which we could slide into the position that we needed uh but if you're wanting to mount this onto aluminium profile which I would imagine most people that are looking at this kind of class of product probably aren't going to be doing but you don't have any ability to get to these holes from the top which means you can't bolt them into te t-nuts on an aluminium profile rig you can only bot them in from the bottom so just be aware of that now you can see on the bottom here we've got these studded rubber feet similar to those massage shoes that you can buy uh those are a optional thing which is included in the package which we stuck on here when we were testing on carpet did do a good job of keeping these fixed in place on carpet being a load sell brake with a rating of 50 kg you will need to have a way to stop your office chair from rolling back and forth if it's on caster wheels so just be aware of that if you're on a tiled floor they do also include some flat rubber pads that you can stick on there as well so good that they've thought about those various different scenarios and they've included inside the packet uh some options to get you up and running regardless of the scenario and I'd say that's definitely one of the strengths that we found overall with this package is that you know it does genuinely include everything that you need as we said in the intro to get up and driving there's no traps that you're going to find along the way with little things that you need to buy to make things work which is great now if you notice underneath here there are a couple of channels that actually allows us to adjust the position of the brake pedal so if we spin it around here you can move the brake pedal left or right within the range of adjustment that we have here so if you prefer to have a bit more spacing between your throttle and your brake pedal you can do that if you want to run as a two- pedal configuration you can do that as well you can't actually put the brake across into this position but you can fold the clutch pedal flat and then move this guy across to the leftmost position and that's going to give you a good amount of spacing between your throttle and your brake pedal so as I said a plastic shell for the pedals will get into the implications of that in just a second we do have this uh kind of patterned metal heel rest here which feels absolutely fine with with socks I don't recommend you use sim pedals with with bare feet I know a lot of people do but you do tend to I mean it gets pretty gross but you get you know dead skin cells and whatnot falling in and yeah it's it's just not a great thing and then you got to clean it so I would recommend at least using socks but this feels quite nice under feet doesn't have any sharp edges or anything like that and does feel quite solid as well so you're not going to feel your feet kind of bouncing around on the plastic surface so that is a relatively good little design feature there the plastic overall does have a lot of flex in it now I'd be lying to you if I said that it was something that I noticed when I was driving given that this is a 50 kg rated brake pedal you're not putting a ton of effort into it in the first place so when I watched the footage back I was actually shocked at how much this whole thing you guys can see it for yourselves you don't need me to explain it but you can see how much this is dipping in the middle here as we push down on the brake pedal even a small amount of you can see in this foot here Tom's actually pushing the brake pedal just with his finger and the whole thing is bending so again it's not something that I noticed when I was driving simply because it is a relatively soft pedal in the first place if it was something that I was putting explosive force into and really kind of pushing in and really modulating my braking inputs right around that you know that maximum amount of force then yeah you would absolutely notice that Flex as you pushed into the pedal because it would be contributing to the overall movement in the pedal but at the levels that we're using here in terms of force just not something that I really found was a factor overall where I would question it though would be in the longevity of the pedals I am concerned that with that amount of flex over time the plastic is going to wear out and ultimately split but obviously we'll just have to see how it Stacks up over time so again if you do buy one of these let us know in the comments if you do have any problems over time it's always valuable for people to be able to see that if they're looking at buying a product obviously if we do run into any issues we'll let you know in a pinned comment as well but you guys collectively are in a much better position to comment on things like that than we are it's definitely an area of concern though while we're on the subject of flex there is a lot of side to side movement in the pedals as well as you can see here quite a lot it's not completely free play like it's not just slopping around or anything like that but there is a lot of movement there definitely something that you notice and it is a little bit more than what you get with the CSL pedals from fitech although they don't come with the load cell by default that is an optional upgrade that you will have to pay for so when you put it in the context if you're comparing it to the offerings from thrustmaster I'm not a big fan of their tlcm load cell pedals which I'd say are probably the most comparable to something like this there's a lot of things about those pedals that just didn't really gel with me but I'd say in terms of build quality this is quite similar if you compare the two side by side and again we do have a couple of videos where we've covered those in detail in the past so just why we're talking about materials and flex and whatnot as I mentioned plastic uh plastic housing here metal heel plate we then do have a pressed steel I believe it is cage for each one of three pedals the pivot Points on either side are also cast aluminium as well so it's not a plastic assembly or stack that is all metal the pedal arms and foot pads are metal as well we do have these plastic inserts behind it if we quickly spin the pedals around again you can see there is a little bit of adjustment in terms of the pedal pads you can move them up or down one spot or left or right one spot as well if you wish to do so so that is a good thing to see in terms of other adjustments here this was one area that I did feel these pedals were lacking compared to other options including those tlcm pedals that we referenced just before in the case of the tlcm pedals there are a couple of different spring configurations and elastomers that you can swap in or swap out to adapt the feeling of the pedal with this literally the only adjustment that you have for the brake pedal is purely just in software now in the software as you can see here there's an adjustment for the dead zone as well as the sensitivity and it's a simple adjustment between a low medium or high setting and what I found is that the low and the medium settings were just absolutely ridiculous they literally and I'm not exaggerating here they literally made the pedal feel like an onoff switch which is just ridiculous with the high setting I was actually overall quite impressed with how the brake operated now remembering again that they are backed into a wall a little bit here because they want to try and make this something that you can use either on carpet or on a on a tiled floor or on a Sim rig now given a 50 kg load rating here for this pedal I was actually surprised at how well these worked on carpet particularly with those stuttered pads that we showed you just earlier I didn't find that uh the pedals were trying to slide across the ground or anything like that now obviously your experience may vary there depending on the type of surface that you're using it on but this is the only load cell pedal set that I've ever used that I didn't have problems with having to physically mount it to my chair or find some way that to stop it sliding across the floor a lot of people just put it hard up against the wall so it can't push up but even just things like pushing down on the pedal wasn't so stiff that I found that it was trying to kick up underneath my feet either uh and yeah overall it was it was a really good experience in a in a desk kind of environment I'm a very heavy footed breaker I generally break with around sort of 70 to 80 kg of force that obviously comes from using very very high-end Sim Racing Equipment which is what I'm used to using so putting this in the appropriate context and also considering the fact that I personally see a lot of comments from people complaining that their uh CSL load cell kit from fitech for example is way too stiff for them having come from something like a Logitech g923 for example I think that the majority of people will actually be quite happy with this brake pedal overall I think that it's a good solid upgrade trade from something like a g923 for example you just need to make sure that you have that sensitivity setting set to 100% because if you don't if you have it set to 25 or 50% the brake is absolutely atrocious and probably the worst brake pedal I've ever used in my life so yeah definitely something I need to tweak uh in the fite ecosystem again to make the comparison there you actually have a braking Force adjustment which can go from zero to 100 and that does allow you to dial it into your particular scenario really nicely I just don't see the reason why they don't give you the same kind of adjustment here it makes no sense to me to have three limitations there when you could just go 0 to 100 and have the ability to dial it in however you want so yeah what I would say with regards to the feel of the brake overall you know if you're comparing it to something like houstonville Sprints or ultimates or vrs pedal something like that yeah it's going to be underwhelming to you if you're comparing it to something like tlcm pedals or g923 pedals or CSL pedals from fitech it's comparable probably on the better side for you know driving on carpet something like that but what I would say is that I was able to I was was able to modulate my braking inputs absolutely fine with that setting set up correctly uh there is a clearly defined threshold point which if you've watched any of my dedicated pedal reviews you would know to me at least that is the most important thing you want to have a clearly defined threshold that you can consistently push to that creates your threshold for breaking and then you can modulate around that trail brake off and whatnot and I feel like these pedals do actually provide that which did genuinely surprise me I expected being a you know being a first attempt at a Sim racing pedals I think pedals are actually the hardest thing to get right on a Sim rig for people that haven't done it before and you know when I compare this to the offerings from say cus and even some of the more expensive offerings from Mozza for example I actually think that these stack up pretty well for the price point so that is the brake pedal but look in terms of the throttle and the clutch pedal look I mean they're relatively underwhelming there's nothing particularly outstanding or bad about them uh I would say that the throttle pedal has a Touch Too Much uh too much throw for me I prefer a slightly shorter throw I was having to extend my ankle more than I would ideally like to the more throw you have obviously the more control you have so it's a very subjective thing but for me it would be nice to at least have some adjustment there so we could shorten the throw if we wanted to the clutch was absolutely fine there's no sort of two stage effect there at all so you don't get that simulated bite Point like you get with some more expensive pedals but again for the price point I don't really see that as a point of complaint I did notice that there was a bit of a crunchy feeling in the clutch pedal now the design between the two of them looks the same externally but the clutch to me actually feels like almost like it's got some sort of of a damping system integrated with it it just it feels like there's a little bit more resistance behind it I'm not sure exactly what's going on there but yeah the throttle pedal basically just feels like a pedal connected to a spring I mean if you try a throttle pedal in a real car you know there's usually not really anything that is particularly remarkable about that either so yeah it is what it is there's no major selling points or detractors from either of these two pedals I would say we do also have some preload adjustment here for the Springs as well so if you want to stiffen the pedals up a little bit you can do do that look under feet I didn't really feel like those adjustments made a significant difference to the Driving Experience overall anyway one thing I do like about the pedals which I think is worth pointing at is they do have little rubber bump stops uh in either direction so that means they are nice and quiet as you can hear with the throttle when we hit that maximum threshold nice and quiet and on the return very quiet as well and the same goes for all three just with the exception of that slight crunchiness that we have in our particular clutch pedal and again let us know if you buy one of these if you have the same experience with the clutch cuz I'm not 100% certain whether it's just our sample or whether they're all going to be like that but that was one thing that I did notice so look overall I think for a first attempt at a set of sim racing pedals honestly they've done a pretty good job again considering the context in which they're expecting people at this kind of price point to use the product I think it does okay the other thing to mention here is uh just there is a little button on the back here for uh switching between direct PC connection so if you want to connect the pedals directly ly to your PC via USB versus a pass through mode for connecting via the PC so a little bit inconvenient to to get to but not really a big deal and it has that same USBC connection that we saw before uh with the nice recess connection so if you do step on the cable it's much less likely to damage the connector itself one question I did see a few people ask is can you separate the pedals from the base and hard Mount them to a rig you could do so with a little bit of fabrication you can see that these cages are just kind of bolted into the plastic assembly but SAR to logitech's cheaper pedals so not the G Pro pedals uh they're not really intended to do so so you're going to have some sort of fabrication work that you're going to need to do the electronics are integrated into this plastic housing as well but I'm sure you could remove that from the housing and put it in a little Jiffy box or something like that if you wanted to get creative so no the pedals aren't intended to be uh removed from the shell and hard mounted but you probably could do so if you really really wanted to so that is the pedals let's now talk about the uh the overall experience of using everything together and what it's like to to drive with now we haven't really touched on the force feedback much yet and there is a very good reason for that because I wanted to focus on the hardware side of things first functionality and whatnot and then really kind of drill into the driving experience in more detail now unfortunately the force feedback experience as it stands right now at initial release of this product is relatively underwhelming now you are getting that direct drive experience in terms of fidelity uh detailing force feedback and whatnot so look here's the deal as as far as I'm concerned if you're coming from a entry-level piece of sim racing equipment and looking to upgrade to something like this you're probably going to be happy with it you're probably going to be impressed with it and you're probably going to wonder what the hell I'm talking about here in terms of nitpicking the force feedback inadequacies I'm coming from a place where I've got experience with much more high-end equipment much more expensive equipment and you know I know what really high quality force feedback should feel like and I guess I'm in a somewhat unique position where I have a good understanding of as you step down through very ious different price points what some of those sacrifices are that you're making in terms of what you're actually feeling through the steering so straight up we need to acknowledge that you know even strength aside here if you're comparing the 7.2 newm that we have here to uh what you get from the 8 newm from a CSL DD with a booster kit or even a Mozza R9 at 9 new M or a Sim magic M10 the force feedback detail that you're getting with this particular wheelbase unfortunately at the time that we're filming this just isn't as good on the flip side to that if you're comparing it to a belt driven like some of the more entry level thrust Master stuff or say a Logitech g923 for example given this is a lot more expensive you are getting a much better experience overall so that sounds pretty subjective objectively what do I actually mean by that what's actually going on with the force feedback here now I touched earlier when we were talking about the dash menu options that there isn't a lot of adjustability in terms of the uh the forced feedback on this so in a more practical and objective sense what does that actually mean so at the point that we're making this video there's actually only three settings that you have for adjusting the force feedback you've got the overall strength maybe if you've got small kids that are using the rig and you just don't want them to have that strength where they can potentially injure themselves that might be a consideration but you know the rest of the time there's no reason to scale back that dynamic range what you would want to do is limit the output of the game so that you're not clipping but then still take full advantage of that full dynamic range that's available on the base so you have that you've then got a k Drive adjustment which is kinetic Drive adjustment that allow you to adjust the responsiveness of the wheel overall how quickly it reacts to what's going on in the Sim so if you're finding that um the wheel feels a little bit sluggish underneath you you can crank that setting up or crank it down if you're finding that it's just a little bit too Snappy and too reactive now I will say that for things like drifting the wheel actually did feel pretty good the uh the ergonomics of the wheel aside being a d-shape which isn't really ideal for that kind of thing but it was relatively intuitive to drive I'm not the world's best drifter but you can see in the footage here I didn't have any problems other than the wheel just bouncing around in my hands cuz of the shape to uh you know control the slip angle or anything like that I did find that it was maybe a little bit robotic and a little bit notchy you might be able to see in the footage here for yourselves uh but I could I could certainly perceive that it was kind of jarring into each position that I wanted it to be rather than being just like a smooth transition but I was able to adapt to that and uh you know it didn't feel sluggish or like it was lagging behind or anything like that which is often the case with belt driven wheels or some more entrylevel direct drive wheels that we've tested in the past so in that regard it was pretty good that's what the k Drive adjustment is aiming to do I didn't find that the actual adjustment made a huge difference there's also a damping adjustment as well which allows you to filter out some of that robotic feel or some of the oscillation that you may experience now I didn't actually experience any oscillation with this particular wheelbase that's been a problem specifically with mozzle wheelbases over the years uh something that they've never really been able to dial out fully so what that means if you're going down a straight and you let go of the wheel the wheel starts to shudder and shake from side to side and sometimes you actually feel that sense ation even if you're holding on to the wheel as well so look in that regard they've done a relatively good job but when you compare this to the likes of say the fitech CSL DD the Sim magic M10 the Mozza R9 R12 and upwards from there uh maybe with the exception of the Logitech G Pro because that doesn't have a lot of adjustability and you know that can be a good or a bad thing because it does make the product a little bit more accessible as we were talking about earlier but there is a distinct lack of adjustment in the force feedback with this particular product and I do feel like it does hold the overall Driving Experience back with this particular product I feel like if they had some more filters there although it might make it seem overwhelming for new people into SIM Racing for the first time if they included some cooked in profiles of different styles of driving which they kind of aim to as you can see in the overlay here you know they do have modes for different driving Styles but all it's really doing is just adjusting that responsiveness it's not adjusting other filters or really doing much else so what that results in is two things firstly you're not able to adjust and tweak this thing to suit your own personal preference like you can with a lot of those other options particularly the csld at around this kind of price point which I do think is a big Advantage you'll see for yourselves if you jump on Reddit or whatever you know the the variation that you get from different people and what they like what they dislike is is often cases massive and you know that kind of goes to demonstrate how important it is to actually be able to find tune settings to your own personal preference which is something that you just really can't do with this particular base now in an objective sense how that actually translates through to the Driving Experience is there's a overall sensation of Disconnect between the wheel and the car when you're driving with this now that's not in the sense that there's a lack of detail the sharpness and the responsiveness of this wheel is actually very good so when you're going up over curbs or feeling textures inside the road or bumping into other cars even there is a good amount of sharpness and detail there you can definitely feel that Sensation that immersion of running up over a curb and feeling that vibration through the wheel for for example what I found and this is just my subjective opinion of using this wheel but what I found compared to even cheaper options like say the uh the C C5 and C C12 that we reviewed recently this particular wheelbase just doesn't give you the sensation of weight or movement or balance of the car like some of those other wheelbases do so while you get that detail you don't feel the sensation of weight in the steering you don't feel the sensation of the suspension the body roll of the car all of those things which are fundamentally important in the absence of actually sitting inside a car and experiencing those GeForce of yourselves the only things that we have in a Sim rig to translate that uh the feeling through the steering and what we actually see with our eyes or if you've got a motion rig you can use that as well or something like a butt kicker but we rely so heavily on the sensation of all those effects through the steering on a simig much more so than what we do in a real life car and in real life the sensation we get through the actual steering wheel uh isn't anywhere near as responsible for communicating what the the car is doing as what we have in a wheelbase in Li of all those other effects that we would feel through the seat of our pants so in that sense the overall driving experience with this wheelbase at this point in time is probably much more similar to something like a belt driven or Cog driven wheelbase than a lot of the other direct drive wheelbases that are on the market now that may sound really harsh and maybe it is a little bit harsh because that detail is there as we discussed but the reality is at this point in time at least there are some really fantastic direct drive wheelbases out there pretty much everything that we've tested from every other Manu manufacturer has given us more of a sensation of what the car is doing underneath us than what this particular product does and look to me unfortunately that is the most disappointing thing about this product I feel like it is something that they fundamentally will be able to fix over time and again we don't we want we don't want to make this an excuse for them but it is their first time releasing a Sim racing product it is a very very difficult thing to get right the hardware is the easy part the software and how it actually integrates with the game and translates those effects across through the steering wheel is the hardest part to get right and we've seen other companies struggle with this a lot I think back to when the dd1 and dd2 were first released from fitech and it took them well over a year I would say In fairness to actually get that to the point where to me at least it even felt as good as the club sport wheelbase 2.5 had previously again detail aside what I'm talking about here is the actual sensation of you know the balance of the car underneath you and I think those early adopters of the dd1 and dd2 would probably know what I was talking about there it had a slightly robotic underlying field the Sim magic M10 which is now a discontinued product also comes to mind a lot of shortcomings in terms of the actual force feedback quality although the steering wheel itself felt quite smooth compared to a belt driven or Cog driven wheelbase so of course we do have the advantage of a completely silent operation here compared to something like a belt driven or Cog driven wheelbase that may be a really strong selling point for some people we have an overall very smooth experience with the steering as well there's no torque Ripple or cogging or sensation of the uh the mechanism switching between magnets inside the motor or anything like that so the steering does feel very fluid and very smooth in your hands and look overall I think that the I I think and I want to say think because I don't know whether it's a limitation of the motor that they're using but my my gut feeling is that they're going to be able to improve the software here and the experience is going to get a lot better over time it's just not quite there yet and I think that to summarize if this was releasing 3 years ago the CSL DD didn't exist yet and you know this was hitting that sweet spot between something like a belt driven Club sport wheelbase 2.5 and something like a dd1 or dd2 or a semic cube or something like that I would say yeah absolutely for the price this thing does a really good job and it's well worth the upgrade over something like a g923 or a belt driven that's not where we are at this point in time when we're recording this video we've got an abundance of choice when it comes to you know more more low powerered direct drive wheelbases we've got the C C5 the C C12 which are both very competitively priced and although we don't rate their pedals at this point in time the experience of actually using the wheelbases is surprising ly good although there are a couple of shortcomings there I think really this the standout if we're comparing to other products around this kind of price point is probably the csld DD with those ready to race bundles now fitech of course do have a lot of issues at the moment with regards to customer service and delays in shipping so that is something that you definitely want to be aware of here I don't know what the experience is like for a customer with Turtle Beach I've never actually bought a product from them in my life so I can't comment on that you guys can let us know in the comments down below but if you are looking at fitech as an alternative to this definitely do need to be aware of some of the issues that they're facing at the moment I would highly recommend jump on the fitech subreddit forum and uh do some reading there some research for your soft so you understand exactly what you're getting into but look the reality of it is is I think there is a lot of potential here I think that there's a lot of really cool things that they've done here particularly with the integration of the dash and having the ability to make all those adjustments including audio adjustments right here from the wheel particularly in the context of people wanting to use this on a on an Xbox console I think that that might end up being a really powerful feature for people maybe not quite so useful on PC but look my honest opinion and this is just my opinion hopefully I've shown you enough objective information in this video that you can make your own judgment here but look my honest opinion is if I was spending my own money I would choose one of those ready to race bundles from fitech and then maybe look at upgrading the brake pedal over buying this or I would save up a little bit more and get something like a Sim magic Alpha mini or even even the Logitech G Pro although it is a lot more expensive than what we have here does give you a superior Driving Experience it also does have true Force as well which adds another layer on top in terms of the Fidelity in terms of the force feedback so that is something that's worth considering as well I don't want to try and steer you towards buying a more expensive product I don't think you necessarily need to spend more than this to get a good Sim racing experience and that's why I kind of come back to those ready to race bundles because I do think that they provide better value for money overall as a complete package than what we're getting out of the Turtle Beach at this point in time but maybe that will change over time I do feel like the shortcomings for the most part other than this horrendously bad button box are mostly related to software and implementation that's kind of what I would expect from a brand new brand entering the uh Sim racing space for the first time so no real surprises there there are a few disappointments there are a few things that I think they've done really well and uh I'm looking forward to seeing what they can come out with in the future but a new brand into the space is always a good thing it adds more competition and that can only be good for Sim Racers like us so if you found the video helpful please do leave a thumbs up make sure you subscribe to the channel as well so you don't miss out on future videos like this one we do have those affiliate links available down in the description box below as well if you want to pick up any of the gear that we've talked about in today's video again that is an awesome way of helping support our work here and no additional cost to you and we really do appreciate your support there but above all thank you very much for watching guys and uh yeah let us know what you think in the comments about the Turtle Beach velocity One race let us know if you own one as well what your experience has been like so far and if you do buy one of these please do set a reminder to come back after 6 to 12 months and let us know in the comments on this video what your experience has been like there are a lot of unknowns and it's always great to get that feedback from you guys I think that it's actually more valuable than the review video itself so thanks for doing that and I will see you again very soon bye

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 53,243

Keywords: turtle beach vs fanatec, turtle beach vs logitech, turtle beach vs moza, turtle beach vs Simagic, Turtle beack velocity one race, turtle beach velocity one race, turtle beach review, best sim racing wheel, sim racing setup, best upgrade from logitech wheel

Id: Rr6t9FIppBM

Length: 67min 0sec (4020 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024