BETTER THAN THE WOLVERINE V3 PRO??? NYXI Master P1 Wireless Xbox Controller Review

If Razer’s Wolverine V3 Pro is almost perfect, this cheap imitation is… better? Yeah, this £40 Xbox style controller from NYXI, the Master P1, is genuinely impressive, and trades blows with the £200 Wolverine V3 Pro, so let me show you around this thing, and point out where it excels, and where it shows its price tag. The shell itself is a straight rip of the V2 Chroma, complete with the RGB lighting separating the grips and the controls – although already we find a budget-borne quality issue. The RGB lighting is clearly just an LED at the top and bottom shining through the plastic channel, which means it’s visibly uneven in brightness. Of course this is completely insignificant, but it’s a sign of what’s to come…

One of the major wins here though are the joysticks – both are hall effect, meaning they use magnets instead of potentiometers, which means these joysticks will never drift. That’s a significant advantage over basically every other controller – especially the stock ones. Of course it isn’t quite as fancy as the V3, as the tips that are permanently on there – although I suppose with disassembly it’d be replaceable – are a little on the cheap feeling side, and as alluded to, are non-replaceable. What you see is what you get. Now they are perfectly fine and I’m sure will last a decent time too, but the V3 definitely has it beat there with not only optional domed or tall concave tips, but outright better feeling rubber too. But, for the price tag, it’s really hard to argue. 

Something else that’s hall effect – and one area where the P1 has the V3 beat for realzize is the triggers. These bad boys are also hall effect, which means they too basically should never fail. I mean mechanically it still can, but electrically you should be good. They feel perfectly normal, nice and smooth, no real qualms there. They do match Razer in the locking function, complete with a tactile switch at the bottom of the much smaller travel, although I’d argue that Razer’s version is a little more refined. It has less travel, and a nicer click, although let’s face it the P1’s triggers are 95% as good at under 25% the price – and technically they are better, being hall effect and all, so it’s important to put that in context. The bumpers though, those are definitely worse. They’re fine, they feel like stock bumpers actually, which is to say decent enough, but not quite as nice as the clicky tactile feel Razer offers. 

The face buttons, that being ABXY, those are your conventional membrane switches. Again, they’re the same as stock, which means a little mushy, and not quite as nice as Razer’s mecha-tactile switches which have a much higher actuation point for a bit of latency improvement, and a very nice tactile click which the P1 doesn’t offer. But again, for just £40, it’s hard to argue this is anything worse than good enough. The D pad does actually have a more tactile feel, although it’s a conventional cross layout rather than a bowl, and it’s still really quite mushy with a fair bit of travel. Again, it’s fine, but not standout.

While we’re by the D pad, it’s worth mentioning that there is a mute button, along with two volume buttons on the bottom where the headphone jack normally is – that feature is missing here – although I can report that the volume controls work great, even on Windows, which is a nice addition. Plus, if we go a little further back, you’ll find another great addition, two extra buttons built into the grips. These are placed perfectly for my middle fingers, feel great, and even have the option to mechanically lock them in place so they can’t be actuated by accident. For certain games that might be pretty helpful. Of course a number of other controllers – Razer included – offer four or more buttons back here, and I’ll leave it up to you whether or not you’d prefer more, but I can say that I found it honestly a little better to only have the two back here. Because these aren’t stock buttons, it takes a bit of extra brain power to use them, and to be able to press one of 8 buttons like the PS5 controller I reviewed recently took too much brain power. Maybe that makes me a smooth brain, but I kinda like the simpler nature of this setup.

Interestingly, thanks to my open source latency testing tool – available at OSRTT.com, linked in the description – I can now do a pretty accurate test for latency on controllers, so naturally I tested this one, and compared it to the Wolverine V3 Pro. I tested both wired and wireless, with the V3 running in it’s 1000Hz mode when wired too. Amazingly, despite the wireless dongle on the P1 feeling like the cheapest trash you could imagine, literally falling apart to reveal an unbadged microcontroller and blinking LED, even wirelessly, the P1 was within one millisecond of the V3 Pro. That’s frankly incredible. Of course when wired – now the V3 has had a firmware update to properly support the 1000Hz mode – the V3 runs away with just 14 milliseconds of latency, compared to 18 milliseconds on the P1. Still, that’s really impressive performance from the ultra-budget controller. 

As for actually using the controller, I’m happy to report that it’s excellent. The shape is spot on for my hands. The textured grips help, although I should note that only the front section is actually textured rubber. They’ve continued the same pattern on the back but it’s just plastic, not rubber, although honestly it’s hard to tell the difference from the palm of your hand so I think that’s a good value tradeoff here. Honestly, this feels just as good as a stock controller, and only the joystick tips make it kind of obvious it isn’t more premium than it is. 

This is an undeniably good value. At just £40 as of filming, this runs rings around basically anything else – including stock controllers – and while it doesn’t quite match up to Razer’s offerings – including the much cheaper V2 Chroma I use personally – it’s still at least half the price, if not a quarter, so I’d call that a great deal. One extra thing I haven’t mentioned yet either is that this actively supports not only Xbox and PC, but Nintendo Switch, Android and iOS. If you want to use this thing with basically anything but a PlayStation, you can. That only adds to the value proposition… So, if you are looking for an Xbox style controller, and don’t have Razer money, get this.