Gadgetory

now if you've been following me for more than five minutes you know I have two passions computers and cars and what's the best way to put them together while you build a nice kick-ass racing simulator now you guys have seen that I'm sitting in the GT Omega art cockpit here I've had it for here's a guy December of 2014 actually yeah long time ago anyway that's besides the point here I have the logitech g27 on here before and it just wasn't good enough so the folks over at fnatic I reached out to them they were willing to sponsor this video to say yeah go ahead and check out some of our stuff what do you want I got to pick it and now we're going to talk about it we're going to take the racing simulator here to the next level now the base right here the most expensive part of this entire kit this thing runs about 600 bucks just for the base no wheel on it or anything but this is responsible for making the wheel feel real a lot of lower end steering wheels we'll just rely on motor resistance to make you feel like you're driving a car and the problem with that is it just doesn't feel realistic because when you drive a car you're driving a power assisted hydraulic steering rack which has a very interesting feel about it when the wheels start to lose grip they start to starts to turn a little bit easier on you because as wheels lose traction they become easier to turn that has to be somehow translated to the steering wheel in your hand to make you feel like that just happened in real life and if you're driving a front-wheel drive car it's even more important to have a base I can actually translate all of that sort of feedback into the steering wheel which is why it's called a force feedback so that kind of leads you to the problem with the lower-end steering wheels is they just rely on a cheap brushed motor to give you that sort of feedback but the clubsport v2 base right here has a direct sensor that's mounted on the steering axis so it avoids a lot of issues are usually found on belt driven wheels with motor mounted sensors it's also completely metal construction belt drive system with ball bearings and it's very precise and it's very very accurate feedback which is what I was mentioning here because it's the hardest part about doing these kinds of videos is you can't feel what it is I'm trying to explain but the best way to explain it is it feels incredibly realistic probably as realistic as you can get without it being a direct drive system here but fnatic actually sent out or they actually set out to really build a belt-driven system here that is going to feel as close to a direct drive system as you possibly can but obviously this is a lot cheaper to do it this way than with the direct drive but the nice thing about the way they constructed this here also too with the way the sensor is mounted and the type of brushless motor they're using is there's absolutely no dead zone which has kind of been one of my biggest complaints is a lot of times with the lower end steering wheels you have a little bit of a dead zone in there so as you get out of that dead zone it'll bounce back real hard and you get this where it's bouncing back and forth if you guys have ever taken a g27 and just kind of you know let go the wheel like that it starts to bounce back and forth all crazy because of the dead zone that doesn't happen with the steering wheel at all but then again considering the thing is about 600 bucks for just the base it better do a pretty damn good job of it now we're going to move on here to the hub because the hub is very very important as you guys saw it as a quick release it's got this big giant spring-loaded actuator here so that you can mount it to the base right there or the servo base and have no problem switching out your wheel because you can actually set up and load out different wheels the actual software and the USB controller is built into the hub not necessarily the base although the base is kind of the main brain of everything the hub is controlling it so you can change out the hubs for different types of wheels you can get yourself like an f1 wheel where all the controls are mounted on to the steering wheel or in my case here I've got a gt3 Cup car wheel with the Xbox one compatible hub we'll talk about that a second or you can even go with something super basic and it's just like an oval wheel hub like like old-school NASCAR not the newer NASCAR's which actually have buttons on the wheels but you can load this out depending on your game and just buy different hubs and different wheels and switch them out now obviously that can get pretty damn expensive considering each one of these hub and wheel assembly is about four hundred dollars in itself but obviously since we're dealing with a GT Cup car here I've got paddle shifters which are all metal construction by the way you can you can really ranked on that and not feel like you're going to break the damn thing because everything we're talking about today is full metal construction which is huge because that's going to really play a big part on long life now I said a second ago that this is the Xbox one hub and some of you might have been like what when I said that but yeah this is xbox one compatible so all the buttons you're going to see on here instead of just kind of being blacked-out buttons like the non Xbox compatible one they're labeled left trigger left bumper X Y a B start select all that sort of stuff and there on the top right here as well which means that obviously they're mapped to Xbox when you turn it on but every single one of these buttons are also customizable in any of the programs that you play and assetto corsa iRacing whatever so they can all be different things start windshield wipers headlights whatever so that's kind of neat you've got all these extra buttons here that you can map the other fan is kind of neat is all of these are on metal arms and they come pre-configured so that the steering wheel like I've got right here can just mount on to it and not interfere with anything you can actually rearrange these and move these around to be a little bit more customizable to however you want them to be I just left it point honestly I sent no reason to move it around but the reason why they also call this a universal hub is it's got six bolt pattern here that's very common to momo Sparco NRG wheels and stuff like that so that you can actually change the steering wheel or don't even have to buy one of theirs if you don't want to or if you already have one to be any type of steering wheel on here that you want and because these arms are customizable and you can move them around chances are it's going to fit with any style wheel you want to put on there so that's I think really really cool is the fact that they are giving real-world support to real-world steering wheels I just opted to get the leather for the Motorsports version on here not really a fan of the way the white Forza Motorsport shows that on there I could black that out too if I want so the size and weight though the wheel that this sent me is actually accurate and true to form to a true GT Cup car so that's pretty neat as I'm sitting here it's about the same size and feel as it would be if I were in a true GT car so it's also got a flat bottom which is kind of nice so it's not going to be hitting my knees but anyway let's move over to the shifter here because this is where when I unboxed the thing I actually said out loud to myself holy crap this thing just reeks of quality my wife went it's that bad huh I was confused as well what do you mean she goes oh I thought you're being sarcastic no this thing is actually pretty badass I wasn't expecting it to be as big and heavy as it is but it also comes with two different shift knobs in fact it comes with this ball style shift knob if I can get it off right here which I happen to really like and it also has a more elongated handle style shift knob so that depending on whichever style style that you like most you can outfit it and off you go but what I thought was really interesting here is the fact that this is a 7-speed manual shift knob with the lockout for Reverse which is kind of neat you get a push it down left it up for reverse I guess it's very similar to a Volkswagen and other European style cars but it's got a 1 through 7 on manual and then it's also got this little button right here this little slider that you can push and convert this to an H pattern gated shifter to a sequential shifter so if you're doing like rallycross games or any sort of race car or GT car that's got a sequential gearbox you can switch this on the fly you don't need two different types of gearboxes it just becomes a sequential automatically and then it springs back when you upshift and downshift and you can map the two GS or the sequential to gear shift to the paddles so that they both are the same so if you have a pedal car or a sponge of car they both use the exact same thing or if you leave this an H pattern you can use the shifters as a sequential so if kind of thought of everything there you can really really row through the gears on this thing and not worry about breaking it that's one of the problems I have my g27 was friends would get on there and try and power shift and shifting and gear really hard the problem was I was terrified that they were going to break my shifter a couple times I think they actually came close so that's going to move us on now to the pedals the pedals can literally make or break the driving experience get it brake the driving it come on I tried I would rather have no pedals at all that have poor pedals that was my biggest problem of the g27 was that all the pedals felt the same to gas the brake and the clutch all felt identical they were just spring-loaded they were linear they felt the same no matter where you push no matter what the condition of the drive was they just always felt the same and in a real car it doesn't feel that way the gas pedals got a unique feel the brake has a unique feel and the clutch has a unique feel so starting with the gas pedal here I kind of now these are fully adjustable and the first thing I did was I actually switched out the regular red spring that comes with them for the included black spring which is actually stiffer so they actually give you two sets of Springs that you can change in there to kind of already customize the feel now I chose to make these feel like nizzy my 370z Nismo if you guys didn't know that's the car that I Drive kind of hard when I want to go have some fun so I wanted my sim rig to feel a lot like nizzy does so I was able to actually adjust this pedal spring for the gas pedal to feel a lot like nizzy because it's an electronic throttle there's no cable on there was just a real linear feel and I was ok with that now the brake on the other hand this is a 90 kilogram load cell brake so it already it takes some real force to push and it is adjustable on the preload so you can make it feel stiffer or softer at the top of the pedal however you want to make it feel now as you guys know brake pedals in real life are hydraulic they are not linear so a spring pedal for brake is terrible it's a terrible way to try and make a racing simulator feel it doesn't feel accurate whatsoever this guy on the other hand when I'm braking it feels very very realistic now they also sent over their damper which can be put on either the brake pedal or the gas pedal which allows you to have a hydraulic feel so if you guys had a cable driven a gas pedal then you could put it on the gas pedal and control the stiffness of the pedal and how hard it is to push giving a much more realistic feel in my case here I went ahead and put it on the brake pedal because I wanted to make it feel more like a true hydraulic brake and boy does it ever because you've got eight damper settings on here from no damper - holy you got to stand on this thing with both feet to make it go now lastly the clutch pedal feels very very real because of this cantilever design they have in there so it's not just a linear press it's actually got this kind of a flip function in there which makes it feel a lot like you actuated the clutch and then released it rather than just having a real linear feel so you know exactly where the clutch engages and disengages make things like double clutching a lot easier and it just makes it feel a whole lot more realistic one other thing worth noting that you might have actually seen in some of the b-roll there is both the gas pedal and the brake pedal actually have these little motors on there that are designed to give you force feedback in the pedal of things like loss of traction through / throttling which is the throttle vibrator if for lack of a better term is going to start going off if you're losing traction due to too much gas same with the brake if you start locking up the wheels the brake pedal is going to start to vibrate so if you want to run a true set up with no brake assist no stability control or any of that stuff and just do pure racecar you can get some actual feedback with the pedal what's happening rather than waiting to see how the car is responding going oh I've got no traction or oh I've locked up the brakes you kind of know it because you can feel it in your foot before the car even starts to respond so that's a nice little touch in there also but you might have noticed a reoccurring theme here of realism and that is what fnatic has really set out to do with this set now this one piece I really want to review but I don't have because they're actually backordered on and that is the handbrake because I could set it here like an e-brake to my right I don't think that makes sense personally because I would like to play around with some of the drifting and assetto corsa and stuff which means I'm going to want it to be up here more on the - set up like a hydro brake but again that's another 100-dollar part unfortunately I can't do a review of that right now it was backordered when they sent this stuff and it's not available until the end of the month but I will be picking one up so that I can set that up and it plugs right into the pedals and allows me to be able to do a lot more controlled drifting by pulling an hydro brake rather than having to try and do it all with a throttle which is kind of neat now this setup right here is not cheap it's not cheap whatsoever it's about 1500 bucks as you see it outfitted right now so you've got to kind of be serious about sim racing to spend that kind of money on this but boy do I think it's worth every single penny now is it the the best system out there no absolutely not is it the cheapest heck no not by a longshot but I think it gives you a pretty good bang for the buck and I know people who are gonna want to shoot me for saying 1,500 bucks bang for the buck there are petal sets out there that cost fifteen hundred dollars by themself there are direct drive units that cost two thousand dollars by themself for the steering wheel you can easily spend seventy thousand dollars on a racing setup so ya bang for buck at fifteen hundred bucks I think is a realistic term now it's not perfect for instance using the Xbox hub right here whenever I turn it on it defaults to the Xbox mode which is really frustrating because I am going to be spending ninety five percent of my time playing it on PC I haven't even tried for Z I'm going to try that in another video so every time I turn it on it goes into the Xbox mode which you can tell because it's got the green ring and then I've got to push these two buttons here to put it into PC mode which is really annoying I've got to do it every single time now the documentation that comes with everything is actually very very basic both the bass and the pedals have a QuickStart guide which simply is nothing more than showing you where to plug stuff in it's only a couple pages because it's in several languages and you also get drilled pattern templates here in case you're building your own rig out of wood or whatever else so that you know where to drill so that you can mount either the twenty degree angled base right here which it goes on to the bottom of the base so you get the wheel kind of more upright like a real column or you can mount it flat if you want it but that's a little less realistic in my opinion it's because they don't want you to have an outdated manual you have to go online download the lays latest PDFs so you always have the most up-to-date mantle which actually I think is a good thing I was trying to figure out why my wheel wouldn't show up but that's because like I said it was booting in xbox mode and then I had to delete the driver and reinstall it because once I installed the driver before having this in PC mode it didn't want to recognize it after that so once I deleted the driver put it in PC mode then reinstall the driver it pretty much saw it and had no problems from there other than that it really wasn't that hard to set up they actually have this exact setup already loaded into it so that it knows all the configs and then all you've got to do is calibrate the wheel and the pedals and you're up and running but all-in-all guys I couldn't be happier this is a this is a very immersive prod and that was the whole point of me wanting this is because now that I'm using VR for my racing setup I wanted something that was going to feel is real as what I was seeing the problem I had with the g27 which I'm comparing it to because that's where I came from was I had VR on and I saw racing stuff all around me but I had this little bitty wheel in this little plastic shifter in these terrible pedals which really didn't make it feel very really guys like that it just didn't make it feel very realistic but now I've got much more my senses or being much more satisfied by what I'm experiencing here with the fanatic club sport stuff versus what I had in the past but again 1500 bucks guys it's not cheap anyway if you guys want to find some more information about this check the description down below you guys will see a link to phonetics website again no kickbacks or affiliates it's just that's the source of where I got it from but I do actually have an affiliate code for GT Omega down there if you guys want to you know you guys can help support the channel if you guys buy any new racing seats or cockpits or desk chairs or whatever you can see the link to that down the description actually save 5% it's good in Europe as well as the United States so I'm gonna get out of here guys I know the video was longer than I normally make there's a lot to talk about it actually was like three products I was doing a review on but with that said I'm gonna get out of here I'm gonna do some more racing and yeah Jerry I you always gave me a hard time about my my setup well I think this is I think it's time to show once and for all who is the better sim racer so if you guys want to see a showdown between Jerry and I and I racing make sure you hit him up on Twitter so hey Jay says he's better than you I'm gonna put my money where my mouth is I've even put money on it alright guys time to get out of here as always I'll see you the next one