Ares
CONSPIT
Thoughts
Aside from the fact that Conspit Ares feels incredibly close to its 20Nm sibling under same settings, it stood out to me for a few reasons:
Reason 1: Even when there is no way to turn the filters all the way down, the important stuff never seems to arrive late. You can be driving with smooth, slightly viscous feedback, and the moment the car steps out, it feels as if the filters drop to their lowest, letting me correct instantly. Once I’ve caught it, the smoothness comes back.
Reason 2: My personal preference could be described as tightrope walking. A perfect balance of detail and smoothing that blurs the line between game forces and real ones. Not every base can walk this line, and so far Conspit sits firmly at the top for me.
Reason 3: Rallying on Conspit bases has been nothing short of a delight, and for me that’s what sets them apart from the competition.
Conspit and its filters
Almost a year and a half ago, when I first spoke with Conspit, they told me they were designing the force feedback to mimic the real life forces. Without the extra “clutter”, or unnecessary canned effects. The result is a wheelbase which doesn’t do much hand holding, or force feed you every last detail. It gives you exactly what matters, in the right amount, and I never felt like this base lacked anything or was dull in any way.
This approach has a catch, though. Compared to the competition, it could very easily be labelled “numb” or “dull”. But to me, that’s like choosing a pair of headphones in the name of “detail” that produce so much bass that it dominates the entire spectrum while the vocals quietly disappear. The word “detail” doesn’t just mean the most crisp, or the quickest reacting base. It needs a delicate balance, and if your preference is anything like mine, you will experience the same.
The same goes for its speed. With the amount of filtering it runs, you’d expect it to be sluggish. But it isn’t and the frequency response plot shows why. The harder the base pushes, the faster it responds. The delay gets shorter and bandwidth increases. Big, important forces get through quicker than light ones. To me, that feels like the filtering adapts to what is happening.
The fast stuff, like road texture, kerb buzz and engine vibrations, is small. Fractions of a Nm riding on top of the big steering forces. So a 50% reading doesn’t mean you lose half your steering force. It means the finer stuff comes through at about half strength.
0 dB means all of the requested torque arrives. −3 dB is the standard engineering cut-off. It’s the point where 71% of the torque, or half the energy, still gets through. The frequency where a curve crosses this line is that base’s bandwidth.
Lag is shown in degrees, where 360° is one full cycle. Faster cycles are shorter, so a bigger angle at a higher frequency does not mean a bigger delay. To get the delay in milliseconds: degrees ÷ (360 × frequency) × 1000. Hover any point to see it in milliseconds. The Delay box at the top is this lag at 5 Hz.
Bandwidth vs torque. Each dot is the bandwidth at one torque level. A flat line means the base delivers the same detail at every strength. A rising or falling line means the detail depends on how hard the base is working.
Delay vs torque. At 5 Hz the base still delivers its full torque. Nothing has rolled off yet, so this shows pure timing, not timing mixed with lost torque. It also represents the forces that matter most, like cornering load, weight transfer and the car going light. Those are slow forces, so this is when the big stuff arrives. Finer detail can arrive sooner or later, which the phase chart above shows. The exact delay can shift by up to 2 ms between test sessions, so read the trend, not the exact number.
The game asks for a sudden jump in torque, like hitting a kerb or the tyres biting. Each curve is the torque the base actually delivered, averaged over every repeat.
Note: The small ripple after each step is the bench ringing at about 200 Hz, not the base.
Slew rate vs torque. Bigger steps move more torque in about the same time, so the slew rate climbs with torque.
Rise / fall time vs torque. Rise time is how long the torque takes to climb from 10% to 90% of the step. Fall time is the same on the way down, from 90% to 10%. A flat line means the base takes the same time no matter how hard it pushes.
Reacting and Letting go
The step test backs up what I felt on track. The base reacts in about 4.4 ms no matter how hard it’s asked to push, so small forces aren’t late to start, they just build more gently. The lightest step takes around 12 ms to build, while bigger steps build in about 6 to 8 ms. Letting go is just as quick, and it settles with very little undershoot, so when the grip suddenly disappears there’s no kickback, just a clean drop. And while 2.6 to 2.9 Nm/ms sounds low next to bigger bases, at the same torque it rises very close to the Ares Platinum. The number is mostly about its 12 Nm ceiling, not a slower motor.