SimXperience AccuForce Pro Steering System Review
Original Article (May 2015): https://selah.ca/simxperience-accuforce-pro-steering-system/
I’ve recently received my SimXperience AccuForce Pro and have been enjoying it for the past week. I’ve only owned one other force feedback wheel, a Logitech G27, and this is, of course, leaps and bounds beyond a G27. There is ample power and tuning options to provide the flexibility sim racers really want to ensure the best and most realistic experience while driving.
I’ll be posting my initial thoughts, my driving and tuning experiences, and providing tips and tricks for various facets of the wheel, it’s tuning software, and for the various sim titles I play.
I’ll be writing this post in parts and updating new sections as I have time and learn new things about the wheel!
Enjoy!
I’ve organized this post under certain headings. If you’re interested in something specific, scan down the headings.
Unboxing
I pre-ordered the AccuForce in January 2015 and received it in May 2015. Believe me, it was well worth the wait. Once shipped it took about 5 days to deliver from the US mid-west to Ontario, Canada.
The box the AccuForce was shipped in. Weights 35lbs. Cost $80 to ship to Ontario, Canada, and will cost $300-$400 in cross-border duties and brokerage shipped from the US.
The suede wheel with button box and quick release mechanism. A very nice looking and feeling wheel.
Cables and controller box
AccuForce base. Solid, heavy, powerful, well-made.
Setup
There’s nothing particularly difficult about assembling the wheel itself. It was a little awkward to handle the 35lbs base while I put in the bolts through the wheel mount on my Obutto R3volution, however. Really, though, it took a few attempts but I got it right quite quickly.
The next steps were connecting the base to the controller box and connecting the controller box to the computer. There’s only one cable coming from the base to the controller box and two usb cables going to the pc. There’s a power cord from the controller box as well. You don’t need both usb cables, by the way, unless you intend to connect usb devices on the wheel hub itself which, if you don’t intend to change anything, you won’t really need to do that.
The Quick Start Guide will be your friend here. It’s a little sparse and could use some more visuals but it does tell you what you need to do.
See the Documents / Requirements tab on the SimXperience website for more documentation.
The last thing they’ll tell you to do is install the Sim Commander software. That was straight forward and it works quite well for what it does.
Can’t update the firmware when Sim Commander starts?
Apparently it’s common problem for Sim Commander to wait forever trying to update the firmware on your wheel when it first starts up. The solution is simply to turn the power off and on again on the controller box. Once I did that the firmware updated in about 10 seconds.
First Impressions
If you’re like me you’ll likely be too impatient at the time to realize what Sim Commander is for and just launch yourself into your favourite sim and tweak your force feedback settings like you always do. That’s what I did for my first experience with the wheel and, honestly, there’s not a lot wrong with that. It felt very strong and I realized immediately the potential it would have once tuned. I had left my previous G27 force strength setting in place and noticed right off the bat the iRacing force meter was showing tonnes of clipping. So I went in and tweaked that until I saw it wasn’t clipping anymore.
Pro Tip: iRacing and other sims don’t really know exactly how much force your wheel can handle or what it’s currently delivering so that’s why Sim Commander’s ability to show exact wheel forces will come in handy.
All this in-game tweaking, however is really not the best approach for the AccuForce way of doing things. Sim Commander comes with plugins for lots of sims and for some it can enable you to rely on the AccuForce’s force feedback handling rather than tweaking all of that in the game. Things like force strength, understeer, smoothing, damping, etc. Games usually provide a lot of options like that but you can also do that in Sim Commander and usually you can tune it better in Sim Commander than in the game.
Once you get into Sim Commander you’ll start to realize the potential of all the tuning options they provide but right out of the box SimXperience has setup a “Default” Wheel Mode. These wheels modes are simply labels for collections of settings applied to the wheel. Things like strength, smoothing, damping, oscillation control, etc.