PXN V10 Ultra Direct Drive Sim Racing Wheel Review

I’m gonna lay this out up front so you have some context for everything I have to say about this thing. This whole kit costs £200. Just keep that in mind as I say anything about this thing. Right, let’s look at this direct drive wheel and pedals combo! This is the PXN V10 Ultra, an ultra-budget direct drive wheel with the highlight features being 3.2 newton metres of peak force, a 270mm wheel and metal hall-effect pedals that can even be upgraded post setup to add a clutch pedal! You can even get a formula style wheel too! Genuinely, this thing is so so impressive. Let’s break it down.

First up, the base. This is remarkably small, with not only the mount but a tilting frame that lets you bolt it to a rig or clamp it to your desk, and tilt it all in one too. Handy! The clamps are pretty rough, as while it looks like they bolt to the mount, as far as I can tell they don’t. That makes the install a little awkward, but it works enough. Anyway, IO on the base is DC in from the 48 watt power brick, a USB C connector to hook up to your system, and three USB C ports for peripherals (shifters, pedals, and “extra”), plus a type A port for “controller”, and an RJ11 for an “e-stop”. The wheel mount is funky – thin plastic but a strong shape and a bunch of pins in the middle. As for the wheel, that’s on the smaller side – think Peugeot wheel, not a BMW – but it’s manageable. It has most of the Xbox buttons, although weirdly the paddles on the back are labelled like PlayStation (L1, L2, R1, R2). The top paddles are your bumpers – tactile (yet mushy) switches for gear shifts – while the bottom two are your triggers (analog inputs), meaning you can use these for clutch and handbrake to pretty great effect. This is actually a really cool choice, and makes this stand out even more than it does already. As for the pedals, those are all metal, hall effect, and remarkably customisable. You can change the resting angle to suit your usage – be that bolted to a cockpit or on the floor – change the spacing with a couple bolts, and if you want, spend £30 extra to add in a clutch pedal too! The pedals connect with RJ11 cables, and then a type C cable from the pedals to the base station. Oh, and the brake pedal comes with an optional secondary two-stage spring to complement the built-in (pretty weak) spring. This is a lot stiffer than without, giving you both a coil spring and a rubber block to push through to get full travel. We’ll get onto how all this feels briefly, but I’ll say that this feels like a cockpit-only type deal rather than on the floor, as you’ll quickly find the whole pedal assembly tipping with this installed. 

Right, that’s the specs and what’s-in-the-box, now to the setup and feel. Once you get this connected and powered up, the first thing you’ll need to do is install PXN’s SimRacing software. In here you can do any firmware updates pending – I had one for the base – then adjust all the settings you’d expect, including steering lock angle (default is 900 degrees), centre the wheel, the force feedback force, max torque, centring force, and rotational stability, and under the ‘advanced settings’ you get a couple extra settings – just Dinput parameters. On the wheel itself you can map the two analog paddles – including as a linked clutch – and all the buttons, and for the pedals you can adjust the output curves of each pedal, including giving them non-linear response if that’s your preference. 

As for the feel, coming from both the Logitech wheels (the G923 specifically) and the Asetek Initium I just checked out (video in the cards above), this feels noticeably smaller in the hands. It feels closer to a kids toy than a sim racing wheel, although I do want to make it clear that this is better than the G923, at least in feel anyway. While the direct drive motor offers almost half the torque as the stock Initium base (I say stock because with a higher power PSU you can go from 5.5 newton metres to 8), the feel is so much better than the G923. It’s much more granular, quieter for sure, and just gives you more texture to the feedback by comparison. Of course the Initium base and wheel is kinda worlds better again, but that’s also triple the price so that’s hardly a fair comparison. Still, the feedback is genuinely good, if a little weak overall. 

The wheel itself, wrapped in its, and I quote, “Automotive-Grade Ultra-Fiber Leather Grip”, feels good, but somehow not quite as premium as it sounds. The buttons feel good enough, as do the paddles, although the gear shifter paddles with their microswitches feel a little anaemic. They’re fine, they are serviceable, but they aren’t actually nice. It’s worth noting you can unbold the faceplate here to swap it out for their formula style wheel plate for £39, which might be a good option. 

The pedals on the other hand – or foot I guess – anyway they feel nice, but man in their cockpit mode (stock) they have so much travel it’s unreal. The throttle pedal is definitely light and having that much travel – even if it’s adjustable – takes some getting used to for sure. The brake pedal’s optional spring is way, way too heavy to use without the pedals being bolted down, meaning I mostly used the pedals without it, and they definitely suffered because of it. The Initium’s pedals were the perfect balance of weight and feel, but neither of the options this has were great. There’s no feel without the spring pack, but it’s unusably stiff with it. It’s a bit of a shame really. 

But, remember what I said at the start? This whole kit – all-metal pedals, a direct drive wheelbase and a wheel – is under £200. It is currently 15 percent off at £195.49 on Amazon (affiliate link in the description), and for that price this is not a question of quite how good is it, it’s a question of is there some horrendous flaw that means you shouldn’t buy this over any other price-comparable option, and the answer to that one seems to be no. It’s great! I mean it’s mid, but this is absolutely a better experience than the G923, and that thing is between £250 and £290, and even with both the clutch pedal and formula style face plate options, you’d be into this thing for less than that. I’m genuinely really surprised by how good this thing is for the money. To be clear, this doesn’t hold a candle to the Asetek Initium bundle, but considering just how cash-strapped the world is these days, if you can only splash out £200 for a sim racing kit, this sure looks like where you should spend it.