Azure Racing F604 Wheel and Dash Review

hey guys will here so Azure racing have been my Benchmark when it comes to the highest quality Sim racing wheels for a number of years now we've got their brand new f60 four wheel in the studio as well as their new Dash So today we're going to be checking these out comparing them to some common Alternatives as well and finding out whether this is the wheel and dash for you let's get started [Music] today but I want to start off by giving you a bit of information just to make sure you've got the full context of exactly what we're doing today so firstly a big thank you to Azure Racing for sending across the wheel and the dash for us to check out today now as I touched on the intro we will be comparing these products to a lot of Alternatives in today's video as well so it's important that you know that all of those products were all sent to us under the exact same conditions here so without rambling on forever what it boils down to is there's no third party has any sort of creative control over anything that we're sharing in today's video or any of our other review videos for that matter they don't get to see the videos before they go live and everything that we're going to be talking about in today's video is my own observations and opinions now if you do decide you want to pick up any of the products that you see in today's video there will be some links down in the description below those are an awesome way of helping support our work here at boosted media at no additional cost to you so we really do appreciate your support there that's what keeps us running and doing what we do but let's get stuck into the wheel and dash now starting with a little bit of pricing information so let's start off with the dash because that's a little bit more simple to explain in terms of pricing there's two variants available with this guy there's the five inch version as you you see here and also a smaller four inch variant the four inch comes in at 369 Euro that includes 19 tax and then the five inch version which we have here comes in at 429 Euro including once again 19 tax so just make sure that you are looking around for local resellers there are quite a few of them again we will put some links to some of our affiliate Partners down in the description below for you but taxes import duties and shipping costs will of course vary depending on where you are in the world so make sure you shop around for the best possible deal then when we look at the wheel this is available also in two variants the simicube wireless version as we see here and the USB version we'll talk about the difference between those two variants in more details we get on through today's video both of those are the same price that is a thousand and ninety nine Euro including once again that 19 tax so to give you a bit of context around the price of this wheel and what we're comparing it to today again depending on where you're located in the shipping and taxes involved in getting a wheel to you you're looking at around the same kind of ballpark price as something like a vrs direct Force Pro wheel we're going to be looking at that on the channel very soon as well uh the grid MPX wheel again we're also going to be checking that out very soon too so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on these reviews and the cube controls F Pro which we have actually already reviewed here on the channel I'll put a link down in the description below for you guys also comes in roughly around the same kind of ballpark price as well so all of these wheels vary in terms of some of the features and benefits that they offer what really stands out about this particular wheel is just the sheer number of inputs that you actually have available to you so we'll of course be unpacking that in all its detail very shortly but before we get into that first thing that I wanted to address was some structural changes that have taken place at Asha racing which I think it's important that you guys are aware of so back when we reviewed the original f28sc which was one of the first in fact the first wheel that I had for my semi-cube 2 ultimate this is actually serial number zero zero one so this was the very first wheel they made in their very first production run back then they were doing everything themselves by hand in-house and therefore the attention to detail the quality was extremely high and that was one of the reasons why Azure racing became one of my benchmarks for Quality now in the time since then they've actually transitioned across to partnering with a third-party company called KW Automotive you might be familiar with them they make some really high-end suspension kits for real-life cars so that partnership has obviously allowed them to greatly increase their production capacity but what are the risks in doing that is always that the level of attention to detail and the overall build quality can suffer now when we looked at the f64 V2 wheel a little while ago link down the description below if you want to see that review we were very impressed with the overall build quality we didn't really see any significant changes in the approach to the design of the PCB you know quality of the soldering materials used anything like that and I was really happy to see that the quality was every bit as good as it was back when they were hand making them themselves in their own Factory and I'm happy to see that things haven't slipped over time either the build quality that we're looking at here is every bit as good as it was with the V2 wheel and every bit as good as the original f28sc that we reviewed as well so I just wanted to note that for you guys because I know a few people working concern about the changes that have been taking place behind the scenes and I wanted to make sure that you guys were aware of them so as I mentioned earlier there are two variants of this wheel available they both look pretty much identical to each other from the front and they both have the same overall feature set in terms of inputs the difference being the USB version connects directly to your PC via USB and is compatible with any wheelbase if you're using it with a fanatic wheelbase you will need to have either an emulator or a fanatic official Hub just to make sure that you enable force feedback on the wheelbase but provided that you can mount the wheel via the 70 millimeter stud pattern to whatever quick release you need for your particular wheelbase that will be compatible with everything now the SC version is a simicube specific Wireless version using simicube's own proprietary Bluetooth protocol so the wireless version of these wheels will only be compatible with Simi Cube 2 bases or simicube one if you have the upgraded Bluetooth module installed in the base itself so just make sure that you're picking the appropriate wheel for your particular usage case remembering again that they both do come in at the same price so regardless of whether you're buying the USB or the wireless version both are only compatible with PC and that goes for the dash as well that connects to your PC via USB and can be operated through common software like Joel real timing Z1 dashboard or Sim Hub and once again that is only PC compatible so we'll get into ergonomics in a lot more detail once we get up and running on the rig a little bit later on in today's video but just to give you a really quick rundown here you're looking at a 285 millimeter diameter so pretty much the perfect diameter in my opinion for a crossover between formula style driving and GT3 GT4 style driving now another important factor in how any wheel feels on your rig as well is the weight so this weighs in at 1140 grams without the quick release that's the same apparently between the USB and the simicube version and just like what we've seen with every other Azure racing wheel that we've looked at over the years absolutely no concerns in terms of build quality whatsoever look at the materials a little bit later on for you guys as well but let's get into the inputs now because there is an absolutely monstrous number of input it's on these wheels now as the f64 name would suggest you've got a total of 64 programmable inputs but you can actually step that up to a lot more than that as you'll see in just a minute so we've got an array of 14 push buttons and those are all positioned around the perimeter of the wheel making them relatively easy to reach without taking your hands off the wheel or taking your eyes off the road one thing you'll notice is there is a little shroud around this inner button here that is to allow you to feel the difference in the position and make sure you're not pressing the wrong button by accident without taking your eyes off the road now if we look at something like a cube controls F Pro for example you can see they've gone into a lot more intricate detail in the plastic shrouds that they have around the buttons now personally I prefer from an aesthetic point of view the cleaner look that we have here on the Asha racing wheel but one advantage that this wheel does have over the Asher racing wheel is if you are driving in VR so you can't actually physically see the wheel this does make it a little bit easier to memorize the feeling of the position of each button under your fingers so particularly if you are wearing gloves in VR that can be very very useful you know with muscle memory and position it's not too much of an issue but if that is something that's important to you then that would be potentially one reason that you might want to look at a cube controls wheel as opposed to something like this but the buttons themselves as we've always seen with Azure racing have a very very nice feel to them now interestingly in their marketing material they refer to these buttons as having haptic feedback and I wasn't sure whether there was some sort of an active system inside the wheel that gave you some sort of mechanical clunk or something like that when you push a button but no there doesn't appear to be anything like that it's it's just referring to the sensation of actually clicking the button and getting that nice mechanical click now one thing that I do really like about these buttons and I'll try to get the wheel on an angle so you can see a little bit better on camera there is quite a nice amount of initial squish in the button before it actually mechanically activates and it's not a really Hollow sounding click either so these are definitely among my personal favorite buttons that I've used on any Sim racing wheel and that's actually remain consistent even though an actual racing wheel was the very first wheel I used with the simiq base through the probably 40 or so wheels that we've tested I still feel like these are among my favorite buttons so again if we compare to a cube controls wheel these don't have that initial squish to them so it's much more of a kind of just clicky in and out digital style button I guess you could say I wouldn't say that one is necessarily better than the other it's just a little bit different and just for the sake of completeness here the vrs will similar kind of feel these don't have that initial squish to them although they do tend to Rattle around a little bit inside the frame which you don't hear if you shake the wheel but you can actually hear if I wiggle them around like so but we'll talk about that when we get into the review of The vrs Wheel at a later time the buttons on the grid will have a slightly softer click to them but a similar kind of action in that they also have a little bit of Squish to them before they actually activate but we'll talk about that in more detail in a later video as well now one thing just to be aware of too there isn't any sort of backlight or illumination on any of the buttons on this wheel whereas with the cube controls F Pro and the grid MPX wheel you do have that functionality so that may be a deal breaker for you now for me personally I'm not overly fussed about LED lighting on buns it's something that I find I can generally take or leave although we are starting to see some really cool things being possible with those RGB LED backlights on buttons having them reactive button presses show things like spotter Telemetry data you know so they are starting to be some pretty creative things that you can do and obviously none of that functionality is available on this particular wheel so worth considering there so moving on with the buttons now we have two seven-way switches here or funky switches as they're often referred to so those can be pushed to the left the right up down push button functionality as well as rotary encoder now interestingly on the simiq wireless version of this wheel one of those stocks can also be used to change force feedback settings on the fly as well without having to alt Tab out of the game which is a really cool option although you don't get any kind of visual representation of what's going on on the wheel itself so it can be a little bit clunky to use and that was something that we weren't super happy about when we checked it out on the simicube taco wheel recently so in a practical sense I really do like any wheel that has two seven-way switches here it allows for very easy menu navigation as well as navigating through things like black boxes within the within the actual simulation itself often Sim racing titles don't allow you to map the same control for navigating through your black box as navigating through the menu so that is made a lot easier by having two of them now the two seven-way switches on this particular wheel do have nice anodized aluminum hats on them too so they have that nice cool to the touch feel if you're not wearing gloves and they have a really nice solid 1 to 10 in each position as well so it's a nice clearly defined click as you rotate through each individual position definitely no complaints when it comes to the Quality there so then looking up the top of the wheel we have two rotary encoders with push button functionality so again a nice solid click and then nice clearly defined detents in each position as well a little bit softer than what we have on a q control as well these are a little bit more Snappy I guess you could say but clearly defined enough that you're not going to accidentally activate these with gloves on or anything like that so they have a really nice I guess more dampened feel to them overall and uh yeah absolutely no complaints there either now this is where we start to get into where we can do some really cool stuff with inputs so you've got a little switch on the back of the semi-cube wireless version and that allows you to switch between push button encoder and shift mode for each of these two rotary encoders so what that means is in the standard mode you've got a standard functioning rotary encoder with mapable push button functionality if you switch it across to the shift mode what that allows you to do is actually have a second function mapped to that rotary encoder so without pushing the button you might be controlling say abs for example and then if you push the button down and rotate it then that actually switches across to a different function entirely so you could use the same knob for abs and traction control for example so same function across both of these guys and you can see here on the back there's a switch for each of these button to independently control them importantly on the USB version of this wheel you don't have these mechanical switches it's done through their software package so moving down to the bottom of the wheel I'm sure you guys have already spotted it a very very welcome addition to the V3 Wheels is the addition of the thumb encoders down the bottom here now look admittedly I would prefer if they were in an upper position here and again I'll grab the cube controls wheel just for reference here you can see if I'm driving I take my thumb off I can very very quickly make those adjustments in the lower position you are going to have to kind of rotate your hand around which if you're mid corner and you're kind of counter steering and doing things like that it can make it a little bit more clunky now because of the layout of the wheel you can see it would be a lot more difficult to have that encoder positioned here just because of the physical design of the wheel but you know at least they're there that is a very big Improvement and we'll comment on the I guess the ergonomics and usability of that a little bit later on when we go driving as well but the rotary encoders themselves here have a really nice filter them once again a nice kind of dampen feeling too they're not too clunky not too clicky clearly defined a tense in each position once again though so you're not going to push these by accident and I would say for me I don't use the term lightly but I would say this is the perfect amount of resistance I do find the cube controls Wheels by comparison are a little bit stiff sometimes with gloves your hand containers tend to slip over it rather than activating it you do you do kind of adjust to it and get used to it over time but I would be lying if I didn't say I preferred the feeling of the ones that we have here and as you can see on the grid MPX wheel we do actually have rotary encoders in the upper and lower position so I wanted to just point that out quickly for you guys as well and those have actually a pretty similar feeling to the ones that we have here and then in addition to that we have two 12 position switches down the bottom of the wheel here too and those have a really really nice action to them it's it's almost got like a kind of springy effect to it so when you're rotate it in each position it's a really really positive click but it's not too stiff feel like you're really connected to something sounds funny but it is a really really nice feeling switch there so the advantage of a multi-position switch as opposed to a rotary encoder is that the Sim racing title provided that it is actually compatible with this function and actually knows what position the switch is in so you can imagine with the rotary encoder the game doesn't actually know the physical position of that switch all it knows is that it was pulsed in that direction so position one on the switch May then end up being positioned seven in the Sim and you can imagine it just kind of counts up from there so you lose track of where you are which means if you're trying to label individual positions on the wheel it can get very confusing and very weird whereas with a multi-position switch engine map number one is always going to be engine map one and so forth so we've got two of those but the functionality doesn't stop there either because again if we flip around on the back of the wheel you can see there's two more switches here and that allows us to switch between the 12 position mode or a rotary shift mode so if we switch those into rotary shift mode and again this is individually addressable between the left and right so you can choose to only do this on the left or the right and again on the USB version of the wheel it's done through software rather than a mechanical switch but what this allows you to do is set up 12 individually mappable functions for the thumb encoders on either side so you can imagine if you go position one that may then be adjusting ABS position 2 might be traction control cut position three might be your standard traction control position four might be engine map and so forth so it gives you 12 individually addressable functions for that one encoder and then you times that by two because you've got the same functionality on the left here so you might want to have say just the right hand side as a multi-position switch for your engine map and then have the right hand side for everything else I don't think you're ever going to need more functionality in terms of inputs than what this wheel is offering and it's really cool to see them kind of thinking outside the box there and doing something a little bit different with the with the functionality of these multi-position switches so yeah definitely think that that's a really cool function so then if we flip the wheel around you can see we've got two magnetic paddle shifters here and Asher racing paddle shifters are my favorite feeling shifters out of every single wheel that I've tried in the past so they've got a really nice positive click to them really kind of Snappy feel it is metal to metal contact so they are a little bit on the loud side Unfortunately they don't include any little rubber dampers like we do see on some other wheels these days but one thing that they do include which I think is really cool is a selection of different neodymium magnets which you can actually swap out and that allows you to adjust the mechanical resistance of these paddles between 260 grams and 800 grams and yeah that allows you to basically fine tune the shifter feel to whatever is going to suit your personal preference which I think is really cool now unfortunately in terms of mechanical adjustment you don't really have anything here for the throw so you can't adjust the shifters in or out in their position you also can't adjust the paddle position in and out but I think look with the layout of the wheel and it being the shape that it is those are in a pretty good position I've got you know relatively small hands but yeah I can't really see that being a problem for anybody it is a full aluminum design here as well so we do see carbon fiber paddles on a lot of other Wheels but you can see in fact here the entire construction of this wheel is all milled or Billet aluminum right through to the cages and the shifter arms themselves so really really high quality stuff here and that continues through to the analog paddles on the bottom here which can be configured as a dual stage clutch or a bite Point clutch and we'll show you how that works a little bit later on or you can map it to individual axes as well they've got a really nice long stroke here which allows for a lot of control so particularly if you're somebody that can't use pedals and you are relying on these for a throttle and a break I think this is going to suit you really well and definitely a lot better than many of the other wheels that have that functionality and these are using contactless hall effect sensors rather than rotary potentiometers as well in case you're wondering now you can actually see there we can move those paddles in a little bit with the second holes there if you wish to do so but again all aluminum construction there no flex in those paddles whatsoever I mean obviously you're never going to be absolutely reefing on this and pulling it as hard as you can but at normal kind of tension levels or maybe a little bit over what you would expect to actually put through that there's no flex there at all and same deal for the shifters as well really really really solid feeling overall so as I referenced earlier full CNC machined aluminum construction pretty much throughout the entire wheel in fact the only plastic bits that you'll find anywhere on this wheel are just the little Bluetooth antenna here if you get the simiq version and the hats on the actual switches themselves everything else here is all anodized aluminum which is really really nice to the touch and that aluminum of course also extends through to the face plate here which you can see has a really nice brushed aluminum finish so it has a really nice kind of glossy shiny look to it that really kind of stands out on your rig at least in my opinion but I really like the fact that they've used a nice thick piece of five millimeter thick aluminum here it just does seem to give it that little bit more rigidity when compared to a piece of carbon fiber of around about the same kind of thickness so I do think that that's a clever design Choice it is a unibody kind of design here as well so this piece of aluminum extends right throughout the grips the grips are molded to the aluminum itself so unfortunately they aren't replaceable we do see that as a bit of a theme across most Sim racing wheels although it is worth noting that the vrs wheels you can actually replace the grips on so we'll look at that when we get into that review but on the subject of the grips unfortunately and I say unfortunately in a in a subjective way because this is something that I personally am not a huge fan of they are using that sticky kind of feeling rubber for the grips here now unfortunately what that means is that it does feel a little bit tacky and gooey under your hands in the in the time that we've been handling this just looking at it on the table you can see how it's kind of picked up this Dusty kind of look that is in fact just dead skin cells that it's picked up off my hands and dirt and debris it just sticks to it like a magnet and it is quite difficult to clean as well obviously you don't want to be using solvents and things like that on the grips because you can't damage them now they have they have really good durability in terms of wear and tear and they've got a good amount of Squish to them but I mean again it is a very subjective thing but I just prefer the feeling of these uh grips that we have on the cube controls F Pro for example which have a similar kind of feel to them in terms of the squishiness but they just have that smoother finish and they just don't pick up all that dirt and debris like what we have on the Asher wheel but I do have to say that the ergonomic design of the grips and how they actually feel in the hands is very very good so if we jump across to the dash as well we haven't talked about this guy very much yet we'll talk about this in more detail when we get up and running on the Sim later on but you can see again very very high quality in terms of materials used it's a completely CNC machined aluminum enclosure front and back we've got an array of 21 LEDs and those are all individually bored as well which means that you're not going to get any bleed between the LEDs which is often the case on a lot of other dashes that we have looked at over the years although more high-end stuff like what we're looking at at this price point does tend to have that design feature as well I do like the fact that they've gone on off switch here and it also does come with two mounts which are both constructed of four millimeter thick carbon fiber so nice and solid one of those is compatible with your fanatec basis so Diddy one dd2 and I believe also the csld D and GT DD Pro so two mounting holes there and then that bolts onto the back like so and you can adjust up and down with the hardware that they include in the box which is a nice touch they also do include some nice anodized aluminum spacers and extended bolts there for mounting to various different bases too so I really do like the fact they include all that kind of Hardware that's another thing I've always liked about Azure racing is I kind of think about all the various different usage cases that might exist and try to include as much Hardware as they can to make it as easy as possible so you have to run to the hardware store when you've just unboxed your brand new shiny piece of gear so that's nice there is also a mount here as well for your standard semi-cube mid Sim Magic and so forth bases as well so that should have you covered for pretty much everything the four inch variant has a resolution of 800 by 480 whereas the five inch like what we see here has a resolution of 854 by 480 it is a resistive touch screen as well and it's using a standard vocore display panel which makes it compatible with Sim Hub Z1 dashboard Joel real timing and all The Usual Suspects as is the case with most dashboards and integrated dashes these days we'll look at that in more detail up on the Sim and talk about contrast ratio colors and all those things a little bit later on so a couple more quick things to cover before we jump into the Sim firstly battery life so unlike the f28sc which was a non-rechargeable battery which you had to replace and admittedly I've never actually had to replace the battery in this although I haven't used this wheel for quite some time so it's probably not really a fair uh a fair comparison but this actually comes with a Lithium Polymer rechargeable battery internally and it's charged through the USB port that you see just down here with the included USB C cable so not into tended to be plugged in while you're driving you can see it's just a standard USBC connection there's no provision there for any extra strength or strain relief or anything like that's not a coiled cable like what you get with the USB version of the wheel but you get 800 hours of Lifetime out of a single charge on the battery even at the point where the battery warning light comes on you should still have about 33 hours worth of usage so very very unlikely that you're going to find yourself in a pickle with it being a battery operated wheel I know that is a thing that concerns a lot of people I've just honestly never ever ever found it to be a problem with any of the wireless wheels that I've used over the years on my semi-cube 2 ultimate so I just really don't think it's anything to worry about at all so yeah given that that's the case even if you do completely flatten the battery which you shouldn't ever do because you can actually damage the battery in doing so there shouldn't ever be a scenario where you wouldn't have enough charge in there to at least get through one race before plugging it in and charging it up anyway and it's extremely unlikely that it's going to go flat on you mid race or anything crazy like that so just lastly I also need to talk about the stick is that they include too because they do include a nice selection of very very nice high quality stickers they've got a kind of matte finish to them I'm not sure exactly what the what the printing process is so I'm not going to pretend that I do but we've got black ones here as well as white ones so you can overlay those on the button faces themselves and then we also have a nice big assortment of rotary encoder stickers here too so I'll try to get all these abbreviations right we've got brake balance traction control ABS or anti-lock braking system Dash menu anti-roll bar differential black box display recup which I think is recuperation or like the the ARs deployment mode or regenerative mode I think that's what it is but I'm sure you guys will let me know in the comments if I've got that wrong volume and then we've also got a blank one here as well which you can label how you want and then obviously a selection of different colors for each of those individual ones so I can't think of too many different things that you would want in addition to that and again nice that they include all of those stickers but anyway I think that's pretty much every everything that we need to cover or quickly in terms of mounting as well as I mentioned earlier 70 millimeter stud pattern just one thing to be aware of here they do have some adapter plates available on their website if you do need to adapt these to other quick releases but most quick releases these days are a 70 millimeter stud pattern anyway just be aware that these are threaded holes so it's going to be most convenient to bolt through some holes on your quick release into the threaded holes on this side if you do need to bolt through from the other side you're just going to need to make sure that you use some captive screws just so you don't end up with any thread binding and you can just remove the casing by undoing the bolts on the front of the wheel the back end comes off very easily just put some captive screws through and you can mount through to your quick release from either site just one other thing to be aware of there as well is if you do have a really shallow quick release you may find that you need to have some sort of a spacer in there as well but for me and my zero play quick release that I run on my Simi Q2 ultimate and for the standard semi-cube sqr quick release that's not a problem Okay so we've got the wheel and dash up and running on the ring I just wanted to quickly run you through the software setup side of things just so you have an idea and a sense of what you're going to be up against if you do decide to buy one of these products so starting with the wheel remembering again that this is the semi-cube version of the wheel if you're wanting to know how the USB version works check out our review that we did of the f64 V2 wheel that shows the software it's pretty much the same idea it's all very very simple in terms of How It's all calibrated the semicube version is a little bit more complicated just because you're having to work with analog inputs to calibrate things and you know it's pretty straightforward once you get your head around it but there's a little bit of detailing here so the first step is going to be to actually get your wheel connected to the semicut exactly the same process as any other simicube Wireless wheel if you've done it before so basically all you're doing is you're just bringing up the wireless profile here you're going to switch on the wheel you'll see one of the LEDs blinking you've only got a couple of seconds to pair it before it goes out of pairing mode on the wheel so you're going to load it up you'll see the wheel pop up here immediately as a as a connectable device you're just going to click on connect selected device and it will go and then you're all good to go so that's all that's required in terms of connecting the wheel to the base the only complexity is then just setting up the analog paddles and if we go back to the main screen now you can see it's actually showing a version of the wheel that's connected to now you can see here I do actually have my paddles and everything all configured that is all good to go I'm just going to quickly run you through the calibration of the analog paddles and also how we set the bite Point clutch as well because that's all done through this software so we're going to go to the settings panel we're going to go to configure analog inputs and you'll see up the top here we've got an option for wireless wheel we're going to click on that and if you want to use a bite Point clutch you're going to set one of these as your master and one as the slave you'll alternate these depending on which hand you want to be which so at the moment my master is my left hand my slave is my right hand and you'll notice that these look like they're running kind of inverted what it's doing is actually comparing the values between the two to give you the end result and you'll see when we get into eye racing in just a second how this actually works so what you want to do here is set a minimum and maximum Dead Zone you want that to be within a couple of percent of the raw value here so you can see at the moment when my when my paddle is completely released I'm getting a raw value of 6.4 so you want to have the dead zone just slightly above that so that you're not accidentally getting a reading if you just touch it or if the calibration slips a tiny bit and likewise with the top as well we look at the raw value when we've got the paddle pulled all the way in and then set the dead zone High to be a couple of percent lower than that so you can see 93 is the raw value I've set it to 89 just to make absolutely sure that I do get 100 engagement we're going to set up the slave exactly the same way on the right hand side or swap them around if you want to and then we go back to the semi-cube 2 tab and we configure the clutch as the option wheel clutch here that's going to tell it to look at that analog input to be the clutch now you will notice there's a little bit of lag here in the input that is just the animation inside the simicube software when we get into eye racing you'll see that it's absolutely fine now if you don't want to use bite Point clutch what you can do is set one of these to be a throttle or a brake or a normal analog clutch or just not configured if you don't want to use it at all now there is an option for bite Point here as well I'm assuming that that must be for a different type of wheel because we definitely want to set this guy to master and slave as per the instructions so if I now want to adjust my bite point I can do that completely from the wheel so the way we do that is we hold down the right hand stick hold it down for a second you'll see we get the orange light there on the right hand side that means we're in adjustment mode and now when we rotate the button on the right that is going to increase in 0.1 increments and on the left in one percent increments so if I pull in my clutch now and you'll notice that on the dash as well we do actually get a reading if we're running the Azure racing Dash which is quite cool so you can see there on the screen we've got 100 clutch engagement if we then release my left hand you'll see that's dropping down to 76.9 on that screen or 76.8 as it's reading on the dash so if I go up here you can see I can increase it 77 77.1 77.2 so forth then if we want to go in one percent increments we can just drop it like that so say I want 72 percent I would set it like that and now when I pull my clutch in I'm getting 100 engagement when I want to get the car underway I'll release my first hand that's going to get me to the point where the clutch is just biting I'm starting to get a little bit of traction and then I can slowly release the second hand to get all the way underway so it's as simple as that for setting up the bite Point remembering again if you do want to swap hands all you need to do is just set the opposite Fort master and slave and you are good to go so that is the calibration and setup of the wheel pretty straightforward you can see the software is a little bit clunky that's not Asha Racing's fault of course that's just simicube dealing with analog inputs and you know being limited because obviously it has to be compatible with as many different devices as possible so if you're using the Azure racing software with the USB version of the wheel it is a lot more straightforward to set that up now we're going to minimize the semi-cube software and Joe into SIM Hub now Sim Hub is the software that they recommend for operating Dash simply because it's compatible with the LEDs and with the dash itself if you do want to run other third-party apps like Joel real timing or Z1 dashboard for example you can run those on the display and have them operate as as well so that's all completely up to you but just to get you started here again what we're going to do is we're going to click on add new device we're going to select the Azure racing four or five inch dashboard so it's great now that Sim Hub does have a lot of profiles cooked in for these types of things and that's just going to load up our default profile here and you can see by default here it's got this kind of Animation that runs through on the LEDs which is quite cool now the first thing I noticed is just how bright the LEDs are on this Dash so that is only 40 brightness believe it on if I go to 100 I've said of other dashes and wheels that they're thermonuclear bright but that is like the sun that is that's way too bright for me but the idea is that you can you can use it as a shift light and kind of see it in your peripheral vision without actually having to look at the dash to see what's going on so it's it's it's cool that it goes that bright I'm sure there'll be some people out there that love it but for me it's definitely way way more bright than I would ever need so being Sim Hub you can completely configure this to you know your own personal taste you can get in there and change pretty much everything about this but by default the profile works really well you've got your standard controls for configuring all the LEDs so flag lights Telemetry all the things that you would expect and all the things that we've covered a million times by now in various different wheel and tax reviews but just to give you a quick idea here if I open up some test data I'm not sure RPM is going to work from here but it will work when we get into eye racing but if we go say DRS active you can see we've got a green light there to let us know that DRS is running DRS enabled as well so that will pop up traction control kicking in ABS kicking in then we can also have flag LEDs for Black Flag White Flag green flag and so forth as well you can also set up spotters too so this is really cool particularly with the bright LEDs if you've got a car on your left it'll blink like that if you've got a car on your right it'll blink like that to give you a visual representation again in your peripheral vision so you're not having to take your eyes off the road which is really cool and then of course you can run any Dash you want through Sim Hub as well so this guy's really the limit there Asha racing do have a really nice looking Dash here which is pre-configured in this profile you can also install that separately if you wish to do so and then being a touch screen as well you can also tab through various different displays if you wish to do so that's also very powerful if you're running something like Z1 dashboard to go through different menus and configure things and whatnot but you know there's so many things you can do there the video would be an hour and a half long if we went into every single thing I think you get the idea in terms of resolution really nice and crisp it isn't the highest resolution in the world if you compare to something like a smartphone for example but more than adequate for what we're doing here and even just a small text there I can read absolutely fine so no issues running leaderboards or anything like that [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] experience with the dash and wheel now I've put probably about six or seven hours of driving into these now over the last couple of days and really really been enjoying the experience I think the 285 millimeter diameter in particular is absolutely perfect for me for all every Everything basically between formula style and GT3 GT4 driving so pretty much anything with a wheel this shape uh this diameter seems to be absolutely spot on for me I just feel I've got just the right amount of control it's not dampening the inputs too much like what you get with a larger diameter and I'm not finding that it's too Twitchy and too kind of all over the place like I find with smaller diameter Wheels now obviously everybody's going to be different there the strength of the wheelbase that you're running will be a factor there too I'm running a Simi Cube to Ultimate here at around about 12 to 14 maybe 15 newton meters at Absolute peak in some of the cars that I was driving and yeah this is absolutely ideal for me at least in that scenario Weight Wise as well I've always been a fan of the weight of the Asher racing wheels they just they've really nailed the balance between you know feeling feeling solid and purposeful in your hand but not being too heavy to the point where it just feels awkward to drive with and the look the balance of this wheel is really great as well it feels almost like it's floating in space rotating around the central axis there it's just yeah they've just done a really good job and they've really nailed all those important aspects when it comes to the actual driving experience with a wheel so the only two complaints that I have with the wheel is just that I don't like this sticky material that they use for the hand grips now admittedly it does tend to grip your hands a little bit better than the smoother surfaces do if you're not wearing gloves I did do some back-to-back driving with the f-pro wheel just to sort of try and you know do some comparison directly and yeah when when I'm In the Heat of the race and my hands are sweating a little bit this one does have a little bit more grip but it just starts to feel tacky and gross under my hand and I just I just don't like the feeling of this material it does pick up that dirt and debris dead skin cells off your hands and whatnot as well so if that's a problem for you you know you may not like the grips on this Unfortunately they aren't interchangeable on this particular wheel like they are with some other Wheels but if you're driving with gloves on which I would imagine most people that are buying a wheel at this kind of price point will likely be doing it's not an issue at all but there's no issues at all with you know rubbing or sharp edges anything like that very very comfortable in terms of ergonomics otherwise the only other thing and you may disagree with me here but I would much prefer to have thumb encoders either in the position up here or here like what we have with the cube controls csx3 for example so you can see that's really nice and easy to operate while you're driving if you're mid corner without having to take your eyes off the road whereas on the on the Asher racing wheel you do kind of have to roll your hand around you can also just kind of roll your thumb down and operate it with your pinky as well and again your your hand shape will determine how difficult or how easy this is to do but for me I just find it a little bit awkward and I did find that until I got used to it I was having to take my eyes off the road to kind of feel where it was and if I was mid Corner trying to make an adjustment I just did find it a little bit more Awkward to do than I would if the encoders are in those other positions but again it's a subjective thing you might disagree with me let me know in the comments what you think about that now as has always been the case with every actual wheel that I've tested the shifters feel absolutely fantastic as well remembering again that you do have those included different magnets so you can change the amount of resistance the default setting is absolutely spot on for me and I just I really love the it's so hard to put my finger on exactly what it is about these shifters but they've just got such a good click to them it almost it almost feels like it's assisted in some way when you when you activate the shift it almost like it it just kind of pushes itself into position it's hard to describe but they've just got an absolutely fantastic a lot of Wheels around this price point do feel absolutely fantastic but every time I go back to using an actual wheel it's there's just something about it in those shifts that I really love it doesn't have as much adjustment available as as a lot of other shifters do at this price point once again you can't adjust the angle of the shifters so if that's important to you then that's maybe a deal breaker but I don't think that's going to be an issue for you I think they're close enough that even if you've got really tiny hands you're going to be how to operate them and even if you've got big hands they're far enough away that I don't think it's going to be an issue the analog paddles have an absolutely fantastic feel to them as well really smooth in operation and as you saw earlier they've got a really long throw to them as well so if you are somebody that wants to use the paddles as a throttle and a break I think that this wheel is going to be ideal for that as well so a couple of notes on the software side of things as well remembering that there is a USB version of this wheel available too which uses their own software so basically it'll work with any wheelbase this particular one is only compatible with simicube two wheelbases or simiccube one if you've got the upgraded Bluetooth module I would like to see a PC compatible Bluetooth version of the window because I do really like driving untethered but obviously that's going to be a limitation with this wheel because if you don't have a semi-cube wheelbase then you're not going to be able to do that you're going to have to go with the tethered USB version the much cheaper Cube controls f-core that we reviewed just a couple of weeks ago does have that functionality and that does come in at a much cheaper price point than this wheel is admittedly the quality isn't as good on that wheel as it is here but we are starting to see that functionality the lyrics xf1 that we review the other day as well again much cheaper than this wheel and it also does have an integrated Dash that has that functionality too so I would like to see maybe they could integrate that into the USB version so you have that option like what we see with those other wheels so yeah the simicube software that you need to use to get this up and running is a little bit daunting at first it did take me sort of 10 minutes or so to get my head around everything to get those analog paddles up and running and calibrated correctly and operating with a clutch bite Point everything else was extremely straightforward though all the all the other buttons and everything were all just completely plug and play and no issues there whatsoever now while we're on the subject of software one thing that I was very very happy about was just how easy the dash was to get up and running we haven't talked about that much yet we're about to get into it but yeah all I needed to do is just upgrade to the latest version of simhub go add device select the profile for this particular Dash and everything just works straight away there was no stuffing around there was no hassle nothing whatsoever now that certainly can't be said for my experience with other dashes and other Wheels with integrated dashes that we've tested in the past there has been instances where it's take taking me literal days to get things working properly and even then you kind of have to set up and hack profiles to get them working with individual cars whereas with this yeah the out of the box experience was really really great now that may have improved on some of those other products given the advances that we've seen in Sim Hub so don't take my word for it that this is easier to use than every other Dash that we've tested but yeah definitely the experience was absolutely fantastic here so yeah from a software side there if you are using Sim Hub you're not going to have any issues there if you're wanting to run it with Z1 dashboard or dual real timing so we're pretty straightforward remembering again that it's just a standard vocore touch screen internally so anything that's compatible with that is going to work with at least the dash here and then of course the LEDs will depend on the software that you're running but you can always run Sim Hub just to control the LEDs and use something else for the display if you want to so there's plenty of options with regards to that as well with regards to dashes as well remembering that you can customize this fully you can use any Dash that you want inside Sim Hub so you really the sky's the limit there in terms of creativity but I was actually really happy with the integrated Azure Dash it shows you all the information that I found relevant when I was driving you can also tab through by tapping on the screen as well to see things like leaderboards if you wish to do so and it does also pop up on the screen as you'll see in this driving footage with adjustments that you make on the wheel as well so if you're adjusting your abs your traction your clutch for example those are all going to show up on the screen in real time that would work with any other Dash as well provided that you're running a profile that has that functionality so it's not really a selling point for this Dash specifically but the two do work really well together in unison so we're going to get into using this as a combo in just a second but also just wanted to mention that another thing that I really appreciated about the dash was the overall brightness particularly these LEDs I was only running them at 40 to 50 percent and that was you know more than bright enough for me at 100 they are so bright that you're going to see them in your peripheral vision and one of the things that I did test was doing away with using crew chief for an audio Spotter and just relying on the flag LEDs on the side to know when there was a car alongside me and I did probably about eight or nine online races in eye racing and didn't have a single incident with another car I was kind of trying to be high hyper focused on you know trying to drive as cleanly as possible and really relying on that and yeah it worked absolutely fine so I'd say if you if you don't want to have that audio Spotter and you're wanting to rely on a visual representation then yeah these are bright enough that you're going to see them in your peripheral vision without having to take your eyes off the road and you know consciously focus on the display to know whether there's cars around you which obviously you're not going to be doing when you're trying to negotiate a race track so are these two products individually worth the money so we'll start with the dash look I mean the thing you've got to be aware of is that there are other dashes on the market which offer the same functionality as this aren't as well presented as this is but cost you know maybe a quarter of the price of something like this so you know we've looked at 3D printed dashes in the past that have led functionality they don't look anywhere near as nice as this but they still have a carbon fiber face plate and you know really it's going to come down to whether having something that's presented like this is you know worth paying four times as much for and really that's a question that only you guys can answer one thing that I will say with regards to the dash though is for the price I do find that actually a racing logo across the front a little obnoxious but let me know in the comments what you guys think about that so yeah really the dash in terms of functionality it's not really offering anything significantly more than something that's significantly cheaper to buy so whether or not it's worth it is purely up to you now with regards to the wheel I mean look again it's a tricky one I mean we reviewed the cube controls F core the other day which does offer a lot of the same functionality now look in terms of the Driving Experience between the two I would much rather drive with the Asher wheel even though I do prefer the grip material that they have on the F core just the little things like the feeling of the rotary encoders in particular just feels a lot more cheap than it does on the Asher wheel the shifters in particular I was pretty harsh on in our review and remembering again that this is a lot cheaper than this wheel is but I would much rather drive with the Asher wheel than this wheel if given the choice again whether or not the difference in price is worth it to you is purely going to come down to your own personal circumstance but I would I would much sooner put this wheel on the rig than this one to drive with I've got to be honest with with you guys so as another point of comparison we also have the cube controls F Pro which comes in at a much more similar price point and is much more evenly matched to this wheel in terms of the look and feel the operation and whatnot now there are a couple of things that I prefer about the Asher wheel to this wheel again I do prefer the feeling of the shifters on the Asher wheel subjectively as well I think that the Asher wheel has a nicer feel in terms of the paddles they're just a little bit stiffer on this wheel which makes it a little bit more difficult to control the inputs for me but you might actually prefer the stiffer spring resistance that you have on the F Pro so again it's a very subjective thing there look this does have the advantage of things like backlit buttons it does have the advantage of thumb encoders in the positions that I like them but the thumb encoders on this don't feel as nice as the ones on the Asher wheel the buttons on the cube control wheel don't have the same kind of nice squishiness that we discussed earlier on in the video too so I do prefer the feeling of the buttons on the Asher wheel again that's a subjective thing we do have aluminum touch points on all of the encoders same as what we have on the Azure wheel but again the feeling of those is just that little bit nicer on the Asher wheel but yeah I think when it comes down to it for most people it's going to come purely down to the Aesthetics so some people might prefer this design others might prefer this obviously having the configurable LED backlights is a big deal for some people personally I kind of feel like I can take it or leave it and I I think given the choice between the two wheels you guys have seen the F Pro on the rig a lot recently I think I probably would run this wheel over this one we'll see have a look at our race videos coming up and see which we'll we end up using um but yeah it is tight between the two the F Pro does have that nice smooth material which I do prefer to drive with with their hands but I'm never driving the Sim rig with bare hands anyway I'm always using gloves so yeah I think I will probably end up using this wheel on the rig more often than I use this one but watch out upcoming race videos and we'll see what transpires so then lastly to wrap things up I know another question that a lot of people are going to have is is it worth looking at a wheel and dash combination like this as opposed to something like a cube control csx3 or a Gomez formula Pro Elite now these obviously have integrated dashes they are strengths and weaknesses of both of these wheels and we're not going to get into comparisons between them you can see the full review of the Gomez wheel and the csx3 right here on the channel I'll drop some links down in the description below for you now look in terms of the Driving Experience overall look I mean admittedly I'm not spending a lot of time looking at a dash when I'm driving anyway now our setup here is quite unique in that I'm able to have my screens low enough that without having a physical Dash here I can still see the virtual Dash inside the Sim and that's what you guys are looking at if you watch our race videos generally speaking so look there are things that you can do with a dash you know displaying leaderboards things like that so flag LEDs which may not work on the on the dash in the Sim depending on what car you're driving of course things like spotted LEDs for example aren't generally going to be operational on a virtual Dash Insider Sim so from a functionality standpoint there is definitely some things you can do with a standalone Dash that you can't do on the virtual Dash inside the Sim but yeah for me me I don't find a lot of time actually looking at the dashboard itself if I am looking at the dashboard for me again I'm generally doing it when I'm driving down a long straight so it doesn't really matter about the position of the dash now the complaint that a lot of people have about Wheels like this is that you know when you when you're driving around you're adjusting your steering you can't read what's on the screen anyway because it's moving around so if you are the sort of person that struggles with that or you think you might struggle with that then yeah I would say that having the dash in a fixed position is the better option and yeah I mean when you look at a combination like this it does come in at a similar kind of price point to a lot of these kind of wheels that we're looking at with integrated dashes so yeah I think it's going to come down to a personal preference thing but for me personally look I just like to run whatever the car has in real life so if I'm driving a car that has an integrated Dash on the steering wheel I'll go with a wheel more like this or the csx3 if I'm driving something that doesn't have a dash then generally I'll just be using a wheel like this and then relying on the virtual Dash on the screen but in lieu of that if you've got screens that sit too high to be able to see the dash then yeah I think that having a dedicated like this is a good option where I think I would land if I was being more budget conscious is probably save the money on a dash like this go with one of those cheaper options that cost like a quarter of the price of something like this and still offer the same functionality as we were discussing earlier and then save that money towards a second wheel that has an integrated Dash and then you've got the best of both worlds that's what I would do but let us know in the comments down below what you guys think but yeah look overall I've really enjoyed the experience driving this wheel over the last couple of days as I said I've put about six or seven hours of pure driving into this now and I think this will become my wheel of choice for anything that uses this shaped wheel and doesn't have an integrated dash at least for the next little while even though I really do wish it had the thumb encoders in those upper positions the other aspects of the wheel that I enjoy enough to I guess outweigh that that disadvantage and make me choose this wheel over others so that's where I've landed with it I do really wish that they offered the ability to customize the button colors I know a lot of people don't like the whole rainbow thing that's going on here I would prefer personally if we maybe just had red and black buttons or maybe yellow on black something like that so you know when we look at competitor products particularly the likes of Gomez for example you do have the option to completely customize the button layout or choose between a couple of different preset options that isn't an option with Azure racing at the moment but I know they are going to be coming out with a bunch of other Wheels relatively soon as well you guys that were at the adac conference last year would have seen some of those I believe so yeah really excited to see what they can bring to the table in terms of some other wheel styles that retain this kind of build quality and functionality so yeah for what it is I think it does an absolutely awesome job and if you're lucky enough to be in a position to buy one of these I don't think you're going to be disappointed so really hope that today's video has helped you out if it has leave a thumbs up if you do want to pick up any of the gear that you've seen in today's video there are some links down in the description which are an awesome way of helping support our work here at boosted media at no additional cost to you so we really appreciate your support there but above all thanks for watching guys and we will see you again very soon bye

hey guys will here so Azure racing have been my Benchmark when it comes to the highest quality Sim racing wheels for a number of years now we&#39;ve got their brand new f60 four wheel in the studio as well as their new Dash So today we&#39;re going to be checking these out comparing them to some common Alternatives as well and finding out whether this is the wheel and dash for you let&#39;s get started [Music] today but I want to start off by giving you a bit of information just to make sure you&#39;ve got the full context of exactly what we&#39;re doing today so firstly a big thank you to Azure Racing for sending across the wheel and the dash for us to check out today now as I touched on the intro we will be comparing these products to a lot of Alternatives in today&#39;s video as well so it&#39;s important that you know that all of those products were all sent to us under the exact same conditions here so without rambling on forever what it boils down to is there&#39;s no third party has any sort of creative control over anything that we&#39;re sharing in today&#39;s video or any of our other review videos for that matter they don&#39;t get to see the videos before they go live and everything that we&#39;re going to be talking about in today&#39;s video is my own observations and opinions now if you do decide you want to pick up any of the products that you see in today&#39;s video there will be some links down in the description below those are an awesome way of helping support our work here at boosted media at no additional cost to you so we really do appreciate your support there that&#39;s what keeps us running and doing what we do but let&#39;s get stuck into the wheel and dash now starting with a little bit of pricing information so let&#39;s start off with the dash because that&#39;s a little bit more simple to explain in terms of pricing there&#39;s two variants available with this guy there&#39;s the five inch version as you you see here and also a smaller four inch variant the four inch comes in at 369 Euro that includes 19 tax and then the five inch version which we have here comes in at 429 Euro including once again 19 tax so just make sure that you are looking around for local resellers there are quite a few of them again we will put some links to some of our affiliate Partners down in the description below for you but taxes import duties and shipping costs will of course vary depending on where you are in the world so make sure you shop around for the best possible deal then when we look at the wheel this is available also in two variants the simicube wireless version as we see here and the USB version we&#39;ll talk about the difference between those two variants in more details we get on through today&#39;s video both of those are the same price that is a thousand and ninety nine Euro including once again that 19 tax so to give you a bit of context around the price of this wheel and what we&#39;re comparing it to today again depending on where you&#39;re located in the shipping and taxes involved in getting a wheel to you you&#39;re looking at around the same kind of ballpark price as something like a vrs direct Force Pro wheel we&#39;re going to be looking at that on the channel very soon as well uh the grid MPX wheel again we&#39;re also going to be checking that out very soon too so make sure you subscribe so you don&#39;t miss out on these reviews and the cube controls F Pro which we have actually already reviewed here on the channel I&#39;ll put a link down in the description below for you guys also comes in roughly around the same kind of ballpark price as well so all of these wheels vary in terms of some of the features and benefits that they offer what really stands out about this particular wheel is just the sheer number of inputs that you actually have available to you so we&#39;ll of course be unpacking that in all its detail very shortly but before we get into that first thing that I wanted to address was some structural changes that have taken place at Asha racing which I think it&#39;s important that you guys are aware of so back when we reviewed the original f28sc which was one of the first in fact the first wheel that I had for my semi-cube 2 ultimate this is actually serial number zero zero one so this was the very first wheel they made in their very first production run back then they were doing everything themselves by hand in-house and therefore the attention to detail the quality was extremely high and that was one of the reasons why Azure racing became one of my benchmarks for Quality now in the time since then they&#39;ve actually transitioned across to partnering with a third-party company called KW Automotive you might be familiar with them they make some really high-end suspension kits for real-life cars so that partnership has obviously allowed them to greatly increase their production capacity but what are the risks in doing that is always that the level of attention to detail and the overall build quality can suffer now when we looked at the f64 V2 wheel a little while ago link down the description below if you want to see that review we were very impressed with the overall build quality we didn&#39;t really see any significant changes in the approach to the design of the PCB you know quality of the soldering materials used anything like that and I was really happy to see that the quality was every bit as good as it was back when they were hand making them themselves in their own Factory and I&#39;m happy to see that things haven&#39;t slipped over time either the build quality that we&#39;re looking at here is every bit as good as it was with the V2 wheel and every bit as good as the original f28sc that we reviewed as well so I just wanted to note that for you guys because I know a few people working concern about the changes that have been taking place behind the scenes and I wanted to make sure that you guys were aware of them so as I mentioned earlier there are two variants of this wheel available they both look pretty much identical to each other from the front and they both have the same overall feature set in terms of inputs the difference being the USB version connects directly to your PC via USB and is compatible with any wheelbase if you&#39;re using it with a fanatic wheelbase you will need to have either an emulator or a fanatic official Hub just to make sure that you enable force feedback on the wheelbase but provided that you can mount the wheel via the 70 millimeter stud pattern to whatever quick release you need for your particular wheelbase that will be compatible with everything now the SC version is a simicube specific Wireless version using simicube&#39;s own proprietary Bluetooth protocol so the wireless version of these wheels will only be compatible with Simi Cube 2 bases or simicube one if you have the upgraded Bluetooth module installed in the base itself so just make sure that you&#39;re picking the appropriate wheel for your particular usage case remembering again that they both do come in at the same price so regardless of whether you&#39;re buying the USB or the wireless version both are only compatible with PC and that goes for the dash as well that connects to your PC via USB and can be operated through common software like Joel real timing Z1 dashboard or Sim Hub and once again that is only PC compatible so we&#39;ll get into ergonomics in a lot more detail once we get up and running on the rig a little bit later on in today&#39;s video but just to give you a really quick rundown here you&#39;re looking at a 285 millimeter diameter so pretty much the perfect diameter in my opinion for a crossover between formula style driving and GT3 GT4 style driving now another important factor in how any wheel feels on your rig as well is the weight so this weighs in at 1140 grams without the quick release that&#39;s the same apparently between the USB and the simicube version and just like what we&#39;ve seen with every other Azure racing wheel that we&#39;ve looked at over the years absolutely no concerns in terms of build quality whatsoever look at the materials a little bit later on for you guys as well but let&#39;s get into the inputs now because there is an absolutely monstrous number of input it&#39;s on these wheels now as the f64 name would suggest you&#39;ve got a total of 64 programmable inputs but you can actually step that up to a lot more than that as you&#39;ll see in just a minute so we&#39;ve got an array of 14 push buttons and those are all positioned around the perimeter of the wheel making them relatively easy to reach without taking your hands off the wheel or taking your eyes off the road one thing you&#39;ll notice is there is a little shroud around this inner button here that is to allow you to feel the difference in the position and make sure you&#39;re not pressing the wrong button by accident without taking your eyes off the road now if we look at something like a cube controls F Pro for example you can see they&#39;ve gone into a lot more intricate detail in the plastic shrouds that they have around the buttons now personally I prefer from an aesthetic point of view the cleaner look that we have here on the Asha racing wheel but one advantage that this wheel does have over the Asher racing wheel is if you are driving in VR so you can&#39;t actually physically see the wheel this does make it a little bit easier to memorize the feeling of the position of each button under your fingers so particularly if you are wearing gloves in VR that can be very very useful you know with muscle memory and position it&#39;s not too much of an issue but if that is something that&#39;s important to you then that would be potentially one reason that you might want to look at a cube controls wheel as opposed to something like this but the buttons themselves as we&#39;ve always seen with Azure racing have a very very nice feel to them now interestingly in their marketing material they refer to these buttons as having haptic feedback and I wasn&#39;t sure whether there was some sort of an active system inside the wheel that gave you some sort of mechanical clunk or something like that when you push a button but no there doesn&#39;t appear to be anything like that it&#39;s it&#39;s just referring to the sensation of actually clicking the button and getting that nice mechanical click now one thing that I do really like about these buttons and I&#39;ll try to get the wheel on an angle so you can see a little bit better on camera there is quite a nice amount of initial squish in the button before it actually mechanically activates and it&#39;s not a really Hollow sounding click either so these are definitely among my personal favorite buttons that I&#39;ve used on any Sim racing wheel and that&#39;s actually remain consistent even though an actual racing wheel was the very first wheel I used with the simiq base through the probably 40 or so wheels that we&#39;ve tested I still feel like these are among my favorite buttons so again if we compare to a cube controls wheel these don&#39;t have that initial squish to them so it&#39;s much more of a kind of just clicky in and out digital style button I guess you could say I wouldn&#39;t say that one is necessarily better than the other it&#39;s just a little bit different and just for the sake of completeness here the vrs will similar kind of feel these don&#39;t have that initial squish to them although they do tend to Rattle around a little bit inside the frame which you don&#39;t hear if you shake the wheel but you can actually hear if I wiggle them around like so but we&#39;ll talk about that when we get into the review of The vrs Wheel at a later time the buttons on the grid will have a slightly softer click to them but a similar kind of action in that they also have a little bit of Squish to them before they actually activate but we&#39;ll talk about that in more detail in a later video as well now one thing just to be aware of too there isn&#39;t any sort of backlight or illumination on any of the buttons on this wheel whereas with the cube controls F Pro and the grid MPX wheel you do have that functionality so that may be a deal breaker for you now for me personally I&#39;m not overly fussed about LED lighting on buns it&#39;s something that I find I can generally take or leave although we are starting to see some really cool things being possible with those RGB LED backlights on buttons having them reactive button presses show things like spotter Telemetry data you know so they are starting to be some pretty creative things that you can do and obviously none of that functionality is available on this particular wheel so worth considering there so moving on with the buttons now we have two seven-way switches here or funky switches as they&#39;re often referred to so those can be pushed to the left the right up down push button functionality as well as rotary encoder now interestingly on the simiq wireless version of this wheel one of those stocks can also be used to change force feedback settings on the fly as well without having to alt Tab out of the game which is a really cool option although you don&#39;t get any kind of visual representation of what&#39;s going on on the wheel itself so it can be a little bit clunky to use and that was something that we weren&#39;t super happy about when we checked it out on the simicube taco wheel recently so in a practical sense I really do like any wheel that has two seven-way switches here it allows for very easy menu navigation as well as navigating through things like black boxes within the within the actual simulation itself often Sim racing titles don&#39;t allow you to map the same control for navigating through your black box as navigating through the menu so that is made a lot easier by having two of them now the two seven-way switches on this particular wheel do have nice anodized aluminum hats on them too so they have that nice cool to the touch feel if you&#39;re not wearing gloves and they have a really nice solid 1 to 10 in each position as well so it&#39;s a nice clearly defined click as you rotate through each individual position definitely no complaints when it comes to the Quality there so then looking up the top of the wheel we have two rotary encoders with push button functionality so again a nice solid click and then nice clearly defined detents in each position as well a little bit softer than what we have on a q control as well these are a little bit more Snappy I guess you could say but clearly defined enough that you&#39;re not going to accidentally activate these with gloves on or anything like that so they have a really nice I guess more dampened feel to them overall and uh yeah absolutely no complaints there either now this is where we start to get into where we can do some really cool stuff with inputs so you&#39;ve got a little switch on the back of the semi-cube wireless version and that allows you to switch between push button encoder and shift mode for each of these two rotary encoders so what that means is in the standard mode you&#39;ve got a standard functioning rotary encoder with mapable push button functionality if you switch it across to the shift mode what that allows you to do is actually have a second function mapped to that rotary encoder so without pushing the button you might be controlling say abs for example and then if you push the button down and rotate it then that actually switches across to a different function entirely so you could use the same knob for abs and traction control for example so same function across both of these guys and you can see here on the back there&#39;s a switch for each of these button to independently control them importantly on the USB version of this wheel you don&#39;t have these mechanical switches it&#39;s done through their software package so moving down to the bottom of the wheel I&#39;m sure you guys have already spotted it a very very welcome addition to the V3 Wheels is the addition of the thumb encoders down the bottom here now look admittedly I would prefer if they were in an upper position here and again I&#39;ll grab the cube controls wheel just for reference here you can see if I&#39;m driving I take my thumb off I can very very quickly make those adjustments in the lower position you are going to have to kind of rotate your hand around which if you&#39;re mid corner and you&#39;re kind of counter steering and doing things like that it can make it a little bit more clunky now because of the layout of the wheel you can see it would be a lot more difficult to have that encoder positioned here just because of the physical design of the wheel but you know at least they&#39;re there that is a very big Improvement and we&#39;ll comment on the I guess the ergonomics and usability of that a little bit later on when we go driving as well but the rotary encoders themselves here have a really nice filter them once again a nice kind of dampen feeling too they&#39;re not too clunky not too clicky clearly defined a tense in each position once again though so you&#39;re not going to push these by accident and I would say for me I don&#39;t use the term lightly but I would say this is the perfect amount of resistance I do find the cube controls Wheels by comparison are a little bit stiff sometimes with gloves your hand containers tend to slip over it rather than activating it you do you do kind of adjust to it and get used to it over time but I would be lying if I didn&#39;t say I preferred the feeling of the ones that we have here and as you can see on the grid MPX wheel we do actually have rotary encoders in the upper and lower position so I wanted to just point that out quickly for you guys as well and those have actually a pretty similar feeling to the ones that we have here and then in addition to that we have two 12 position switches down the bottom of the wheel here too and those have a really really nice action to them it&#39;s it&#39;s almost got like a kind of springy effect to it so when you&#39;re rotate it in each position it&#39;s a really really positive click but it&#39;s not too stiff feel like you&#39;re really connected to something sounds funny but it is a really really nice feeling switch there so the advantage of a multi-position switch as opposed to a rotary encoder is that the Sim racing title provided that it is actually compatible with this function and actually knows what position the switch is in so you can imagine with the rotary encoder the game doesn&#39;t actually know the physical position of that switch all it knows is that it was pulsed in that direction so position one on the switch May then end up being positioned seven in the Sim and you can imagine it just kind of counts up from there so you lose track of where you are which means if you&#39;re trying to label individual positions on the wheel it can get very confusing and very weird whereas with a multi-position switch engine map number one is always going to be engine map one and so forth so we&#39;ve got two of those but the functionality doesn&#39;t stop there either because again if we flip around on the back of the wheel you can see there&#39;s two more switches here and that allows us to switch between the 12 position mode or a rotary shift mode so if we switch those into rotary shift mode and again this is individually addressable between the left and right so you can choose to only do this on the left or the right and again on the USB version of the wheel it&#39;s done through software rather than a mechanical switch but what this allows you to do is set up 12 individually mappable functions for the thumb encoders on either side so you can imagine if you go position one that may then be adjusting ABS position 2 might be traction control cut position three might be your standard traction control position four might be engine map and so forth so it gives you 12 individually addressable functions for that one encoder and then you times that by two because you&#39;ve got the same functionality on the left here so you might want to have say just the right hand side as a multi-position switch for your engine map and then have the right hand side for everything else I don&#39;t think you&#39;re ever going to need more functionality in terms of inputs than what this wheel is offering and it&#39;s really cool to see them kind of thinking outside the box there and doing something a little bit different with the with the functionality of these multi-position switches so yeah definitely think that that&#39;s a really cool function so then if we flip the wheel around you can see we&#39;ve got two magnetic paddle shifters here and Asher racing paddle shifters are my favorite feeling shifters out of every single wheel that I&#39;ve tried in the past so they&#39;ve got a really nice positive click to them really kind of Snappy feel it is metal to metal contact so they are a little bit on the loud side Unfortunately they don&#39;t include any little rubber dampers like we do see on some other wheels these days but one thing that they do include which I think is really cool is a selection of different neodymium magnets which you can actually swap out and that allows you to adjust the mechanical resistance of these paddles between 260 grams and 800 grams and yeah that allows you to basically fine tune the shifter feel to whatever is going to suit your personal preference which I think is really cool now unfortunately in terms of mechanical adjustment you don&#39;t really have anything here for the throw so you can&#39;t adjust the shifters in or out in their position you also can&#39;t adjust the paddle position in and out but I think look with the layout of the wheel and it being the shape that it is those are in a pretty good position I&#39;ve got you know relatively small hands but yeah I can&#39;t really see that being a problem for anybody it is a full aluminum design here as well so we do see carbon fiber paddles on a lot of other Wheels but you can see in fact here the entire construction of this wheel is all milled or Billet aluminum right through to the cages and the shifter arms themselves so really really high quality stuff here and that continues through to the analog paddles on the bottom here which can be configured as a dual stage clutch or a bite Point clutch and we&#39;ll show you how that works a little bit later on or you can map it to individual axes as well they&#39;ve got a really nice long stroke here which allows for a lot of control so particularly if you&#39;re somebody that can&#39;t use pedals and you are relying on these for a throttle and a break I think this is going to suit you really well and definitely a lot better than many of the other wheels that have that functionality and these are using contactless hall effect sensors rather than rotary potentiometers as well in case you&#39;re wondering now you can actually see there we can move those paddles in a little bit with the second holes there if you wish to do so but again all aluminum construction there no flex in those paddles whatsoever I mean obviously you&#39;re never going to be absolutely reefing on this and pulling it as hard as you can but at normal kind of tension levels or maybe a little bit over what you would expect to actually put through that there&#39;s no flex there at all and same deal for the shifters as well really really really solid feeling overall so as I referenced earlier full CNC machined aluminum construction pretty much throughout the entire wheel in fact the only plastic bits that you&#39;ll find anywhere on this wheel are just the little Bluetooth antenna here if you get the simiq version and the hats on the actual switches themselves everything else here is all anodized aluminum which is really really nice to the touch and that aluminum of course also extends through to the face plate here which you can see has a really nice brushed aluminum finish so it has a really nice kind of glossy shiny look to it that really kind of stands out on your rig at least in my opinion but I really like the fact that they&#39;ve used a nice thick piece of five millimeter thick aluminum here it just does seem to give it that little bit more rigidity when compared to a piece of carbon fiber of around about the same kind of thickness so I do think that that&#39;s a clever design Choice it is a unibody kind of design here as well so this piece of aluminum extends right throughout the grips the grips are molded to the aluminum itself so unfortunately they aren&#39;t replaceable we do see that as a bit of a theme across most Sim racing wheels although it is worth noting that the vrs wheels you can actually replace the grips on so we&#39;ll look at that when we get into that review but on the subject of the grips unfortunately and I say unfortunately in a in a subjective way because this is something that I personally am not a huge fan of they are using that sticky kind of feeling rubber for the grips here now unfortunately what that means is that it does feel a little bit tacky and gooey under your hands in the in the time that we&#39;ve been handling this just looking at it on the table you can see how it&#39;s kind of picked up this Dusty kind of look that is in fact just dead skin cells that it&#39;s picked up off my hands and dirt and debris it just sticks to it like a magnet and it is quite difficult to clean as well obviously you don&#39;t want to be using solvents and things like that on the grips because you can&#39;t damage them now they have they have really good durability in terms of wear and tear and they&#39;ve got a good amount of Squish to them but I mean again it is a very subjective thing but I just prefer the feeling of these uh grips that we have on the cube controls F Pro for example which have a similar kind of feel to them in terms of the squishiness but they just have that smoother finish and they just don&#39;t pick up all that dirt and debris like what we have on the Asher wheel but I do have to say that the ergonomic design of the grips and how they actually feel in the hands is very very good so if we jump across to the dash as well we haven&#39;t talked about this guy very much yet we&#39;ll talk about this in more detail when we get up and running on the Sim later on but you can see again very very high quality in terms of materials used it&#39;s a completely CNC machined aluminum enclosure front and back we&#39;ve got an array of 21 LEDs and those are all individually bored as well which means that you&#39;re not going to get any bleed between the LEDs which is often the case on a lot of other dashes that we have looked at over the years although more high-end stuff like what we&#39;re looking at at this price point does tend to have that design feature as well I do like the fact that they&#39;ve gone on off switch here and it also does come with two mounts which are both constructed of four millimeter thick carbon fiber so nice and solid one of those is compatible with your fanatec basis so Diddy one dd2 and I believe also the csld D and GT DD Pro so two mounting holes there and then that bolts onto the back like so and you can adjust up and down with the hardware that they include in the box which is a nice touch they also do include some nice anodized aluminum spacers and extended bolts there for mounting to various different bases too so I really do like the fact they include all that kind of Hardware that&#39;s another thing I&#39;ve always liked about Azure racing is I kind of think about all the various different usage cases that might exist and try to include as much Hardware as they can to make it as easy as possible so you have to run to the hardware store when you&#39;ve just unboxed your brand new shiny piece of gear so that&#39;s nice there is also a mount here as well for your standard semi-cube mid Sim Magic and so forth bases as well so that should have you covered for pretty much everything the four inch variant has a resolution of 800 by 480 whereas the five inch like what we see here has a resolution of 854 by 480 it is a resistive touch screen as well and it&#39;s using a standard vocore display panel which makes it compatible with Sim Hub Z1 dashboard Joel real timing and all The Usual Suspects as is the case with most dashboards and integrated dashes these days we&#39;ll look at that in more detail up on the Sim and talk about contrast ratio colors and all those things a little bit later on so a couple more quick things to cover before we jump into the Sim firstly battery life so unlike the f28sc which was a non-rechargeable battery which you had to replace and admittedly I&#39;ve never actually had to replace the battery in this although I haven&#39;t used this wheel for quite some time so it&#39;s probably not really a fair uh a fair comparison but this actually comes with a Lithium Polymer rechargeable battery internally and it&#39;s charged through the USB port that you see just down here with the included USB C cable so not into tended to be plugged in while you&#39;re driving you can see it&#39;s just a standard USBC connection there&#39;s no provision there for any extra strength or strain relief or anything like that&#39;s not a coiled cable like what you get with the USB version of the wheel but you get 800 hours of Lifetime out of a single charge on the battery even at the point where the battery warning light comes on you should still have about 33 hours worth of usage so very very unlikely that you&#39;re going to find yourself in a pickle with it being a battery operated wheel I know that is a thing that concerns a lot of people I&#39;ve just honestly never ever ever found it to be a problem with any of the wireless wheels that I&#39;ve used over the years on my semi-cube 2 ultimate so I just really don&#39;t think it&#39;s anything to worry about at all so yeah given that that&#39;s the case even if you do completely flatten the battery which you shouldn&#39;t ever do because you can actually damage the battery in doing so there shouldn&#39;t ever be a scenario where you wouldn&#39;t have enough charge in there to at least get through one race before plugging it in and charging it up anyway and it&#39;s extremely unlikely that it&#39;s going to go flat on you mid race or anything crazy like that so just lastly I also need to talk about the stick is that they include too because they do include a nice selection of very very nice high quality stickers they&#39;ve got a kind of matte finish to them I&#39;m not sure exactly what the what the printing process is so I&#39;m not going to pretend that I do but we&#39;ve got black ones here as well as white ones so you can overlay those on the button faces themselves and then we also have a nice big assortment of rotary encoder stickers here too so I&#39;ll try to get all these abbreviations right we&#39;ve got brake balance traction control ABS or anti-lock braking system Dash menu anti-roll bar differential black box display recup which I think is recuperation or like the the ARs deployment mode or regenerative mode I think that&#39;s what it is but I&#39;m sure you guys will let me know in the comments if I&#39;ve got that wrong volume and then we&#39;ve also got a blank one here as well which you can label how you want and then obviously a selection of different colors for each of those individual ones so I can&#39;t think of too many different things that you would want in addition to that and again nice that they include all of those stickers but anyway I think that&#39;s pretty much every everything that we need to cover or quickly in terms of mounting as well as I mentioned earlier 70 millimeter stud pattern just one thing to be aware of here they do have some adapter plates available on their website if you do need to adapt these to other quick releases but most quick releases these days are a 70 millimeter stud pattern anyway just be aware that these are threaded holes so it&#39;s going to be most convenient to bolt through some holes on your quick release into the threaded holes on this side if you do need to bolt through from the other side you&#39;re just going to need to make sure that you use some captive screws just so you don&#39;t end up with any thread binding and you can just remove the casing by undoing the bolts on the front of the wheel the back end comes off very easily just put some captive screws through and you can mount through to your quick release from either site just one other thing to be aware of there as well is if you do have a really shallow quick release you may find that you need to have some sort of a spacer in there as well but for me and my zero play quick release that I run on my Simi Q2 ultimate and for the standard semi-cube sqr quick release that&#39;s not a problem Okay so we&#39;ve got the wheel and dash up and running on the ring I just wanted to quickly run you through the software setup side of things just so you have an idea and a sense of what you&#39;re going to be up against if you do decide to buy one of these products so starting with the wheel remembering again that this is the semi-cube version of the wheel if you&#39;re wanting to know how the USB version works check out our review that we did of the f64 V2 wheel that shows the software it&#39;s pretty much the same idea it&#39;s all very very simple in terms of How It&#39;s all calibrated the semicube version is a little bit more complicated just because you&#39;re having to work with analog inputs to calibrate things and you know it&#39;s pretty straightforward once you get your head around it but there&#39;s a little bit of detailing here so the first step is going to be to actually get your wheel connected to the semicut exactly the same process as any other simicube Wireless wheel if you&#39;ve done it before so basically all you&#39;re doing is you&#39;re just bringing up the wireless profile here you&#39;re going to switch on the wheel you&#39;ll see one of the LEDs blinking you&#39;ve only got a couple of seconds to pair it before it goes out of pairing mode on the wheel so you&#39;re going to load it up you&#39;ll see the wheel pop up here immediately as a as a connectable device you&#39;re just going to click on connect selected device and it will go and then you&#39;re all good to go so that&#39;s all that&#39;s required in terms of connecting the wheel to the base the only complexity is then just setting up the analog paddles and if we go back to the main screen now you can see it&#39;s actually showing a version of the wheel that&#39;s connected to now you can see here I do actually have my paddles and everything all configured that is all good to go I&#39;m just going to quickly run you through the calibration of the analog paddles and also how we set the bite Point clutch as well because that&#39;s all done through this software so we&#39;re going to go to the settings panel we&#39;re going to go to configure analog inputs and you&#39;ll see up the top here we&#39;ve got an option for wireless wheel we&#39;re going to click on that and if you want to use a bite Point clutch you&#39;re going to set one of these as your master and one as the slave you&#39;ll alternate these depending on which hand you want to be which so at the moment my master is my left hand my slave is my right hand and you&#39;ll notice that these look like they&#39;re running kind of inverted what it&#39;s doing is actually comparing the values between the two to give you the end result and you&#39;ll see when we get into eye racing in just a second how this actually works so what you want to do here is set a minimum and maximum Dead Zone you want that to be within a couple of percent of the raw value here so you can see at the moment when my when my paddle is completely released I&#39;m getting a raw value of 6.4 so you want to have the dead zone just slightly above that so that you&#39;re not accidentally getting a reading if you just touch it or if the calibration slips a tiny bit and likewise with the top as well we look at the raw value when we&#39;ve got the paddle pulled all the way in and then set the dead zone High to be a couple of percent lower than that so you can see 93 is the raw value I&#39;ve set it to 89 just to make absolutely sure that I do get 100 engagement we&#39;re going to set up the slave exactly the same way on the right hand side or swap them around if you want to and then we go back to the semi-cube 2 tab and we configure the clutch as the option wheel clutch here that&#39;s going to tell it to look at that analog input to be the clutch now you will notice there&#39;s a little bit of lag here in the input that is just the animation inside the simicube software when we get into eye racing you&#39;ll see that it&#39;s absolutely fine now if you don&#39;t want to use bite Point clutch what you can do is set one of these to be a throttle or a brake or a normal analog clutch or just not configured if you don&#39;t want to use it at all now there is an option for bite Point here as well I&#39;m assuming that that must be for a different type of wheel because we definitely want to set this guy to master and slave as per the instructions so if I now want to adjust my bite point I can do that completely from the wheel so the way we do that is we hold down the right hand stick hold it down for a second you&#39;ll see we get the orange light there on the right hand side that means we&#39;re in adjustment mode and now when we rotate the button on the right that is going to increase in 0.1 increments and on the left in one percent increments so if I pull in my clutch now and you&#39;ll notice that on the dash as well we do actually get a reading if we&#39;re running the Azure racing Dash which is quite cool so you can see there on the screen we&#39;ve got 100 clutch engagement if we then release my left hand you&#39;ll see that&#39;s dropping down to 76.9 on that screen or 76.8 as it&#39;s reading on the dash so if I go up here you can see I can increase it 77 77.1 77.2 so forth then if we want to go in one percent increments we can just drop it like that so say I want 72 percent I would set it like that and now when I pull my clutch in I&#39;m getting 100 engagement when I want to get the car underway I&#39;ll release my first hand that&#39;s going to get me to the point where the clutch is just biting I&#39;m starting to get a little bit of traction and then I can slowly release the second hand to get all the way underway so it&#39;s as simple as that for setting up the bite Point remembering again if you do want to swap hands all you need to do is just set the opposite Fort master and slave and you are good to go so that is the calibration and setup of the wheel pretty straightforward you can see the software is a little bit clunky that&#39;s not Asha Racing&#39;s fault of course that&#39;s just simicube dealing with analog inputs and you know being limited because obviously it has to be compatible with as many different devices as possible so if you&#39;re using the Azure racing software with the USB version of the wheel it is a lot more straightforward to set that up now we&#39;re going to minimize the semi-cube software and Joe into SIM Hub now Sim Hub is the software that they recommend for operating Dash simply because it&#39;s compatible with the LEDs and with the dash itself if you do want to run other third-party apps like Joel real timing or Z1 dashboard for example you can run those on the display and have them operate as as well so that&#39;s all completely up to you but just to get you started here again what we&#39;re going to do is we&#39;re going to click on add new device we&#39;re going to select the Azure racing four or five inch dashboard so it&#39;s great now that Sim Hub does have a lot of profiles cooked in for these types of things and that&#39;s just going to load up our default profile here and you can see by default here it&#39;s got this kind of Animation that runs through on the LEDs which is quite cool now the first thing I noticed is just how bright the LEDs are on this Dash so that is only 40 brightness believe it on if I go to 100 I&#39;ve said of other dashes and wheels that they&#39;re thermonuclear bright but that is like the sun that is that&#39;s way too bright for me but the idea is that you can you can use it as a shift light and kind of see it in your peripheral vision without actually having to look at the dash to see what&#39;s going on so it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s cool that it goes that bright I&#39;m sure there&#39;ll be some people out there that love it but for me it&#39;s definitely way way more bright than I would ever need so being Sim Hub you can completely configure this to you know your own personal taste you can get in there and change pretty much everything about this but by default the profile works really well you&#39;ve got your standard controls for configuring all the LEDs so flag lights Telemetry all the things that you would expect and all the things that we&#39;ve covered a million times by now in various different wheel and tax reviews but just to give you a quick idea here if I open up some test data I&#39;m not sure RPM is going to work from here but it will work when we get into eye racing but if we go say DRS active you can see we&#39;ve got a green light there to let us know that DRS is running DRS enabled as well so that will pop up traction control kicking in ABS kicking in then we can also have flag LEDs for Black Flag White Flag green flag and so forth as well you can also set up spotters too so this is really cool particularly with the bright LEDs if you&#39;ve got a car on your left it&#39;ll blink like that if you&#39;ve got a car on your right it&#39;ll blink like that to give you a visual representation again in your peripheral vision so you&#39;re not having to take your eyes off the road which is really cool and then of course you can run any Dash you want through Sim Hub as well so this guy&#39;s really the limit there Asha racing do have a really nice looking Dash here which is pre-configured in this profile you can also install that separately if you wish to do so and then being a touch screen as well you can also tab through various different displays if you wish to do so that&#39;s also very powerful if you&#39;re running something like Z1 dashboard to go through different menus and configure things and whatnot but you know there&#39;s so many things you can do there the video would be an hour and a half long if we went into every single thing I think you get the idea in terms of resolution really nice and crisp it isn&#39;t the highest resolution in the world if you compare to something like a smartphone for example but more than adequate for what we&#39;re doing here and even just a small text there I can read absolutely fine so no issues running leaderboards or anything like that [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] experience with the dash and wheel now I&#39;ve put probably about six or seven hours of driving into these now over the last couple of days and really really been enjoying the experience I think the 285 millimeter diameter in particular is absolutely perfect for me for all every Everything basically between formula style and GT3 GT4 driving so pretty much anything with a wheel this shape uh this diameter seems to be absolutely spot on for me I just feel I&#39;ve got just the right amount of control it&#39;s not dampening the inputs too much like what you get with a larger diameter and I&#39;m not finding that it&#39;s too Twitchy and too kind of all over the place like I find with smaller diameter Wheels now obviously everybody&#39;s going to be different there the strength of the wheelbase that you&#39;re running will be a factor there too I&#39;m running a Simi Cube to Ultimate here at around about 12 to 14 maybe 15 newton meters at Absolute peak in some of the cars that I was driving and yeah this is absolutely ideal for me at least in that scenario Weight Wise as well I&#39;ve always been a fan of the weight of the Asher racing wheels they just they&#39;ve really nailed the balance between you know feeling feeling solid and purposeful in your hand but not being too heavy to the point where it just feels awkward to drive with and the look the balance of this wheel is really great as well it feels almost like it&#39;s floating in space rotating around the central axis there it&#39;s just yeah they&#39;ve just done a really good job and they&#39;ve really nailed all those important aspects when it comes to the actual driving experience with a wheel so the only two complaints that I have with the wheel is just that I don&#39;t like this sticky material that they use for the hand grips now admittedly it does tend to grip your hands a little bit better than the smoother surfaces do if you&#39;re not wearing gloves I did do some back-to-back driving with the f-pro wheel just to sort of try and you know do some comparison directly and yeah when when I&#39;m In the Heat of the race and my hands are sweating a little bit this one does have a little bit more grip but it just starts to feel tacky and gross under my hand and I just I just don&#39;t like the feeling of this material it does pick up that dirt and debris dead skin cells off your hands and whatnot as well so if that&#39;s a problem for you you know you may not like the grips on this Unfortunately they aren&#39;t interchangeable on this particular wheel like they are with some other Wheels but if you&#39;re driving with gloves on which I would imagine most people that are buying a wheel at this kind of price point will likely be doing it&#39;s not an issue at all but there&#39;s no issues at all with you know rubbing or sharp edges anything like that very very comfortable in terms of ergonomics otherwise the only other thing and you may disagree with me here but I would much prefer to have thumb encoders either in the position up here or here like what we have with the cube controls csx3 for example so you can see that&#39;s really nice and easy to operate while you&#39;re driving if you&#39;re mid corner without having to take your eyes off the road whereas on the on the Asher racing wheel you do kind of have to roll your hand around you can also just kind of roll your thumb down and operate it with your pinky as well and again your your hand shape will determine how difficult or how easy this is to do but for me I just find it a little bit awkward and I did find that until I got used to it I was having to take my eyes off the road to kind of feel where it was and if I was mid Corner trying to make an adjustment I just did find it a little bit more Awkward to do than I would if the encoders are in those other positions but again it&#39;s a subjective thing you might disagree with me let me know in the comments what you think about that now as has always been the case with every actual wheel that I&#39;ve tested the shifters feel absolutely fantastic as well remembering again that you do have those included different magnets so you can change the amount of resistance the default setting is absolutely spot on for me and I just I really love the it&#39;s so hard to put my finger on exactly what it is about these shifters but they&#39;ve just got such a good click to them it almost it almost feels like it&#39;s assisted in some way when you when you activate the shift it almost like it it just kind of pushes itself into position it&#39;s hard to describe but they&#39;ve just got an absolutely fantastic a lot of Wheels around this price point do feel absolutely fantastic but every time I go back to using an actual wheel it&#39;s there&#39;s just something about it in those shifts that I really love it doesn&#39;t have as much adjustment available as as a lot of other shifters do at this price point once again you can&#39;t adjust the angle of the shifters so if that&#39;s important to you then that&#39;s maybe a deal breaker but I don&#39;t think that&#39;s going to be an issue for you I think they&#39;re close enough that even if you&#39;ve got really tiny hands you&#39;re going to be how to operate them and even if you&#39;ve got big hands they&#39;re far enough away that I don&#39;t think it&#39;s going to be an issue the analog paddles have an absolutely fantastic feel to them as well really smooth in operation and as you saw earlier they&#39;ve got a really long throw to them as well so if you are somebody that wants to use the paddles as a throttle and a break I think that this wheel is going to be ideal for that as well so a couple of notes on the software side of things as well remembering that there is a USB version of this wheel available too which uses their own software so basically it&#39;ll work with any wheelbase this particular one is only compatible with simicube two wheelbases or simiccube one if you&#39;ve got the upgraded Bluetooth module I would like to see a PC compatible Bluetooth version of the window because I do really like driving untethered but obviously that&#39;s going to be a limitation with this wheel because if you don&#39;t have a semi-cube wheelbase then you&#39;re not going to be able to do that you&#39;re going to have to go with the tethered USB version the much cheaper Cube controls f-core that we reviewed just a couple of weeks ago does have that functionality and that does come in at a much cheaper price point than this wheel is admittedly the quality isn&#39;t as good on that wheel as it is here but we are starting to see that functionality the lyrics xf1 that we review the other day as well again much cheaper than this wheel and it also does have an integrated Dash that has that functionality too so I would like to see maybe they could integrate that into the USB version so you have that option like what we see with those other wheels so yeah the simicube software that you need to use to get this up and running is a little bit daunting at first it did take me sort of 10 minutes or so to get my head around everything to get those analog paddles up and running and calibrated correctly and operating with a clutch bite Point everything else was extremely straightforward though all the all the other buttons and everything were all just completely plug and play and no issues there whatsoever now while we&#39;re on the subject of software one thing that I was very very happy about was just how easy the dash was to get up and running we haven&#39;t talked about that much yet we&#39;re about to get into it but yeah all I needed to do is just upgrade to the latest version of simhub go add device select the profile for this particular Dash and everything just works straight away there was no stuffing around there was no hassle nothing whatsoever now that certainly can&#39;t be said for my experience with other dashes and other Wheels with integrated dashes that we&#39;ve tested in the past there has been instances where it&#39;s take taking me literal days to get things working properly and even then you kind of have to set up and hack profiles to get them working with individual cars whereas with this yeah the out of the box experience was really really great now that may have improved on some of those other products given the advances that we&#39;ve seen in Sim Hub so don&#39;t take my word for it that this is easier to use than every other Dash that we&#39;ve tested but yeah definitely the experience was absolutely fantastic here so yeah from a software side there if you are using Sim Hub you&#39;re not going to have any issues there if you&#39;re wanting to run it with Z1 dashboard or dual real timing so we&#39;re pretty straightforward remembering again that it&#39;s just a standard vocore touch screen internally so anything that&#39;s compatible with that is going to work with at least the dash here and then of course the LEDs will depend on the software that you&#39;re running but you can always run Sim Hub just to control the LEDs and use something else for the display if you want to so there&#39;s plenty of options with regards to that as well with regards to dashes as well remembering that you can customize this fully you can use any Dash that you want inside Sim Hub so you really the sky&#39;s the limit there in terms of creativity but I was actually really happy with the integrated Azure Dash it shows you all the information that I found relevant when I was driving you can also tab through by tapping on the screen as well to see things like leaderboards if you wish to do so and it does also pop up on the screen as you&#39;ll see in this driving footage with adjustments that you make on the wheel as well so if you&#39;re adjusting your abs your traction your clutch for example those are all going to show up on the screen in real time that would work with any other Dash as well provided that you&#39;re running a profile that has that functionality so it&#39;s not really a selling point for this Dash specifically but the two do work really well together in unison so we&#39;re going to get into using this as a combo in just a second but also just wanted to mention that another thing that I really appreciated about the dash was the overall brightness particularly these LEDs I was only running them at 40 to 50 percent and that was you know more than bright enough for me at 100 they are so bright that you&#39;re going to see them in your peripheral vision and one of the things that I did test was doing away with using crew chief for an audio Spotter and just relying on the flag LEDs on the side to know when there was a car alongside me and I did probably about eight or nine online races in eye racing and didn&#39;t have a single incident with another car I was kind of trying to be high hyper focused on you know trying to drive as cleanly as possible and really relying on that and yeah it worked absolutely fine so I&#39;d say if you if you don&#39;t want to have that audio Spotter and you&#39;re wanting to rely on a visual representation then yeah these are bright enough that you&#39;re going to see them in your peripheral vision without having to take your eyes off the road and you know consciously focus on the display to know whether there&#39;s cars around you which obviously you&#39;re not going to be doing when you&#39;re trying to negotiate a race track so are these two products individually worth the money so we&#39;ll start with the dash look I mean the thing you&#39;ve got to be aware of is that there are other dashes on the market which offer the same functionality as this aren&#39;t as well presented as this is but cost you know maybe a quarter of the price of something like this so you know we&#39;ve looked at 3D printed dashes in the past that have led functionality they don&#39;t look anywhere near as nice as this but they still have a carbon fiber face plate and you know really it&#39;s going to come down to whether having something that&#39;s presented like this is you know worth paying four times as much for and really that&#39;s a question that only you guys can answer one thing that I will say with regards to the dash though is for the price I do find that actually a racing logo across the front a little obnoxious but let me know in the comments what you guys think about that so yeah really the dash in terms of functionality it&#39;s not really offering anything significantly more than something that&#39;s significantly cheaper to buy so whether or not it&#39;s worth it is purely up to you now with regards to the wheel I mean look again it&#39;s a tricky one I mean we reviewed the cube controls F core the other day which does offer a lot of the same functionality now look in terms of the Driving Experience between the two I would much rather drive with the Asher wheel even though I do prefer the grip material that they have on the F core just the little things like the feeling of the rotary encoders in particular just feels a lot more cheap than it does on the Asher wheel the shifters in particular I was pretty harsh on in our review and remembering again that this is a lot cheaper than this wheel is but I would much rather drive with the Asher wheel than this wheel if given the choice again whether or not the difference in price is worth it to you is purely going to come down to your own personal circumstance but I would I would much sooner put this wheel on the rig than this one to drive with I&#39;ve got to be honest with with you guys so as another point of comparison we also have the cube controls F Pro which comes in at a much more similar price point and is much more evenly matched to this wheel in terms of the look and feel the operation and whatnot now there are a couple of things that I prefer about the Asher wheel to this wheel again I do prefer the feeling of the shifters on the Asher wheel subjectively as well I think that the Asher wheel has a nicer feel in terms of the paddles they&#39;re just a little bit stiffer on this wheel which makes it a little bit more difficult to control the inputs for me but you might actually prefer the stiffer spring resistance that you have on the F Pro so again it&#39;s a very subjective thing there look this does have the advantage of things like backlit buttons it does have the advantage of thumb encoders in the positions that I like them but the thumb encoders on this don&#39;t feel as nice as the ones on the Asher wheel the buttons on the cube control wheel don&#39;t have the same kind of nice squishiness that we discussed earlier on in the video too so I do prefer the feeling of the buttons on the Asher wheel again that&#39;s a subjective thing we do have aluminum touch points on all of the encoders same as what we have on the Azure wheel but again the feeling of those is just that little bit nicer on the Asher wheel but yeah I think when it comes down to it for most people it&#39;s going to come purely down to the Aesthetics so some people might prefer this design others might prefer this obviously having the configurable LED backlights is a big deal for some people personally I kind of feel like I can take it or leave it and I I think given the choice between the two wheels you guys have seen the F Pro on the rig a lot recently I think I probably would run this wheel over this one we&#39;ll see have a look at our race videos coming up and see which we&#39;ll we end up using um but yeah it is tight between the two the F Pro does have that nice smooth material which I do prefer to drive with with their hands but I&#39;m never driving the Sim rig with bare hands anyway I&#39;m always using gloves so yeah I think I will probably end up using this wheel on the rig more often than I use this one but watch out upcoming race videos and we&#39;ll see what transpires so then lastly to wrap things up I know another question that a lot of people are going to have is is it worth looking at a wheel and dash combination like this as opposed to something like a cube control csx3 or a Gomez formula Pro Elite now these obviously have integrated dashes they are strengths and weaknesses of both of these wheels and we&#39;re not going to get into comparisons between them you can see the full review of the Gomez wheel and the csx3 right here on the channel I&#39;ll drop some links down in the description below for you now look in terms of the Driving Experience overall look I mean admittedly I&#39;m not spending a lot of time looking at a dash when I&#39;m driving anyway now our setup here is quite unique in that I&#39;m able to have my screens low enough that without having a physical Dash here I can still see the virtual Dash inside the Sim and that&#39;s what you guys are looking at if you watch our race videos generally speaking so look there are things that you can do with a dash you know displaying leaderboards things like that so flag LEDs which may not work on the on the dash in the Sim depending on what car you&#39;re driving of course things like spotted LEDs for example aren&#39;t generally going to be operational on a virtual Dash Insider Sim so from a functionality standpoint there is definitely some things you can do with a standalone Dash that you can&#39;t do on the virtual Dash inside the Sim but yeah for me me I don&#39;t find a lot of time actually looking at the dashboard itself if I am looking at the dashboard for me again I&#39;m generally doing it when I&#39;m driving down a long straight so it doesn&#39;t really matter about the position of the dash now the complaint that a lot of people have about Wheels like this is that you know when you when you&#39;re driving around you&#39;re adjusting your steering you can&#39;t read what&#39;s on the screen anyway because it&#39;s moving around so if you are the sort of person that struggles with that or you think you might struggle with that then yeah I would say that having the dash in a fixed position is the better option and yeah I mean when you look at a combination like this it does come in at a similar kind of price point to a lot of these kind of wheels that we&#39;re looking at with integrated dashes so yeah I think it&#39;s going to come down to a personal preference thing but for me personally look I just like to run whatever the car has in real life so if I&#39;m driving a car that has an integrated Dash on the steering wheel I&#39;ll go with a wheel more like this or the csx3 if I&#39;m driving something that doesn&#39;t have a dash then generally I&#39;ll just be using a wheel like this and then relying on the virtual Dash on the screen but in lieu of that if you&#39;ve got screens that sit too high to be able to see the dash then yeah I think that having a dedicated like this is a good option where I think I would land if I was being more budget conscious is probably save the money on a dash like this go with one of those cheaper options that cost like a quarter of the price of something like this and still offer the same functionality as we were discussing earlier and then save that money towards a second wheel that has an integrated Dash and then you&#39;ve got the best of both worlds that&#39;s what I would do but let us know in the comments down below what you guys think but yeah look overall I&#39;ve really enjoyed the experience driving this wheel over the last couple of days as I said I&#39;ve put about six or seven hours of pure driving into this now and I think this will become my wheel of choice for anything that uses this shaped wheel and doesn&#39;t have an integrated dash at least for the next little while even though I really do wish it had the thumb encoders in those upper positions the other aspects of the wheel that I enjoy enough to I guess outweigh that that disadvantage and make me choose this wheel over others so that&#39;s where I&#39;ve landed with it I do really wish that they offered the ability to customize the button colors I know a lot of people don&#39;t like the whole rainbow thing that&#39;s going on here I would prefer personally if we maybe just had red and black buttons or maybe yellow on black something like that so you know when we look at competitor products particularly the likes of Gomez for example you do have the option to completely customize the button layout or choose between a couple of different preset options that isn&#39;t an option with Azure racing at the moment but I know they are going to be coming out with a bunch of other Wheels relatively soon as well you guys that were at the adac conference last year would have seen some of those I believe so yeah really excited to see what they can bring to the table in terms of some other wheel styles that retain this kind of build quality and functionality so yeah for what it is I think it does an absolutely awesome job and if you&#39;re lucky enough to be in a position to buy one of these I don&#39;t think you&#39;re going to be disappointed so really hope that today&#39;s video has helped you out if it has leave a thumbs up if you do want to pick up any of the gear that you&#39;ve seen in today&#39;s video there are some links down in the description which are an awesome way of helping support our work here at boosted media at no additional cost to you so we really appreciate your support there but above all thanks for watching guys and we will see you again very soon bye

Transcript for:Azure Racing F604 Wheel and Dash Review

Transcript for:
Azure Racing F604 Wheel and Dash Review