So, I really decided to buy it as a gift for a friend together with a new wheel as he is still stuck with a really old Microsoft Sidewinder wheel. Thought a shifter would be a nice addition as he finally gets a better wheel and 3 pedals.
It arrived yesterday and I quickly checked it for a bit. Just looking at the hardware and connecting it, trying to configure it but not actually using it while driving.
So, what should I say... for those < €100 you get what you'd imagine. Before you continue reading, keep in mind that I personally use a Fanatec club sport shifter.
Just looking at the pictures, I expected to get something which does not look like good 3d printed quality. The finished product actually looks better than on the photos on their website. However, it really feels extremely light and thus just like a toy. While trying to clamp it to the table I wa afraid of breaking it but it survived. Not sure how good it holds with the table clamp when you get a bit crazy while driving. So if you can somehow mount it with screws, don't go and buy the table clamp (but I guess not everyone without a racing rig is crazy enough to drill holes into their tables).
I fully expect the following experience to be an issue with my computer: Once I pluged the USB cable in, steam big picture decided to show up and thought I had connected a Playstation 3 controller for some reason. I closed it and went to the windows game controller settings. It was just marked as "Generic Game Controller" which is fine. I tried each gear and had another WTF moment. Once I chose 3rd gear, the window closed. All other gears worked fine but every time I chose 3rd, it just closed. This happened in some other windows as well. I decided to open notepad and tried each gear. Nothing happend in 3rd but 4th gear suddenly made a tab stop in notepad.
Confused I tried to configure the shifter in Assetto Corsa Content manager. I could setup every gear except 3rd gear.
I gave up and decided to just try it on another computer and connected it to my Microsoft Surface Book. This time, there were no issues. No windows closed on 3rd gear and no tab stops were entered on 4th gear in notepad. Still, really weird what happened on my main desktop computer. None of my other SIM gear was connected at the time nor was any kind of mapping software running so I don't get it.
The feature where you can easily convert it to a sequential shifter is great. Just push it in, turn it slightly and you feel a kind of click. Afterwards, change the switch on the side from HH to SQ and you're done. However, if you plan to use it that way you should actually really buy the sequential shifter plate as it could still easily happen to make wrong movements to the sides. Of course switching those plates would take longer but it's safer.
All in all, after using the Fanatec Shifter for so long, it really feels just like a toy and I'm not sure how long it will survive if it's heavily used. If you don't have much of a budget and are not driving that often, you can go for it, otherwise try to get some more money and buy at least the Fanatec Shifter.
