Hi,
I own a Saitek X65F for a day now and used it for 2 hours. Tried it with Falcon4. So there are a little more issues that I'm not too happy about. But more on that later.
The stick, stick base, trigger, throttle and throttle base are all solid metal. I wouldn't use it as a hammer though, too little weight on the head and it handles weird for that purpose ;). Everything else is plastic (including the bottom of the stick- and throttle bases).
You can't operate the stick alone, you have to connect it to the throttle. The throttle has a USB cable (length 2m) and the cable to the stick (PS2 type, length 1,75m) attached. There is another cable for the displays and switchboxes, also of type PS2. So all cables are non removable attached to the throttle.
Everything you can push gives an audible and tactile feedback. There isn't much force needed to push.
The hats offer almost no resistance in moving them. In my opinion that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the setup, because it gives you a feeling of holding a very cheap piece of hardware.
As an example, the mouse cursor is pushable, but you can't really push without moving the mouse it's so easygoing
Overall impression: I like the force sensing, but they have to work on the centering issue (it's a little bit offset)
The stick is good, the throttle not. The movement of the throttle offers too much resistance, the hats and buttons are not ergonomically placed, the mechanism to hold the two throttle levers together can't hold them together without play. And coming back to what I mentioned at the start of the post, I miss a rocker switch like on the TM HOTAS Cougar. But that is a special for the F-16. But why make a force sensing stick, which is only used in a F-16 AFAIK and not have a replica of the real F-16 HOTAS setup? Licensing I guess...
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I saw also a little spiking of the throttle and rotaries in the Falcon4 setup screen, but not in the Saitek Test Center SW.
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The hats are exchangeable on the stick.
To sum it up: too expensive right now
Cheers Wolfman