Review: So cheap, so good - The EasySMX X05 games controller offers multi-platform fun

Back in April I reviewed the EasySMX X10 controller, a controller that I liked so much that I gave the purple review unit to my brother, and bought myself a black one to match my workstation theme.

Fast forward a few months and today I have in my hands the new X05 which comes in three colourways, Lime, Black and Oyster White. It is aimed at the budget conscious gamer who doesn't want to compromise on the fundamentals of what makes a good controller.

The X05 comes in at £24 / €28.95 / $29.99 and is available right now through EasySMX (get 10% off by registering your email) or Amazon. AliExpress also has it listed with an intro discount of 58% at the time of writing for those who don't mind taking a chance at import duty slipping through the net.

Specifications

Construction

The controller is all plastic, but unlike other controllers in this price range the X05 feels like the plastic is thick and put together with some solid construction. There is no flexing no matter how hard I try to twist each grip between both hands and pressing in any area of the shell results in no compression.

A quick shake test only rattles the dual vibration motors and none of the face buttons appear to have any abnormal play. Everything appears to be tightly put together and it does not look or feel like something that only costs £24.

The hall effect sticks, and joystick caps are well judged, not too stiff, not too short and not too slippery, just right. Dare I say it, I prefer the stick feel on the X05 than the slightly shorter sticks and rubber texture on them on the X10.

The face buttons on the X05 are membrane tactile, whilst the X10's buttons are mechanical tactile. Both implementations are done well by EasySMX, I like the mechanical feel and noise more, but the tactile membrane on the X05 is better quality, especially in this price range.

The X05 also features anti-friction rings around the sticks which was a surprise as I originally thought these were just RGB LEDs but turns out EasySMX incorporated translucency on the rings which allowed for dual functionality. More on the LEDs a bit later.

Here's a sound clip of the buttons being noise tested, and a quick bend test.

In the hands

A great controller is pointless if it's not comfortable in the hands, and the X05 does not disappoint here thanks to that tight construction and choice of materials. For example, I have the new GameSir Kaleid and Kaleid Flux review to post up very soon, the Flux model also uses membrane face buttons, yet they feel cheap and tacky compared to the button feedback on the X05. The X05 is almost half the cost of the Kaleid Flux for comparison.

The shoulder buttons and triggers are all within quick reach and resting my fingers over them posed no problems with accidental presses. The shoulders are tactile in actuation and feel, also membrane, and well judged.

The D-pad deserves a mention, too, it is a bit larger than the X10's D-pad, as well as the D-pads used by GameSir and other competitors. 8BitDo would one off the top of my head that has a similarly sized D-pad, but the one on the X05 feels considerably better.

The grips don't have a lightly dimpled texture which aids comfort and grip. Unlike other controllers that cost about the same, the finishing of this texture is very refined and nice to the touch.

Trigger actuation is well-sprung, but this is also where my only gripe with the controller lies. The surface of the triggers has no texturing or knurling, it is just smooth matte.

About 6mm in front the inner edge of the trigger is a straight line angling the rest of the trigger downward. I feel this is unnecessary and just adds a weird line I can feel under the fingers.

My preference is that the triggers should be curved and textured for comfort which then adds an additional grip element. The shoulder buttons are not textured too as you can see above, but this is largely a non-issue given the placement of them being very good.

Customisation

The LED colour on the rings can be changed, but only as a pair, and only through a range of presets rather than any granular selection as there's no app to manage the controller. This is done via the M button being pressed twice, then moving the left stick up, down, left or right to switch between LED modes and colours.

A final press of the M button stores the changes. The LEDs can also be turned off completely if RGB is not wanted.

The same goes for configuring the vibration level. Holding the M button and moving the left stick up or down toggles between 5 levels of vibration. The rumble intensity of the X05 is considerably stronger at the highest level than that on the X10, which was a bit of a surprise.

Lastly, other button combos activate features such as self-calibration of the hall effect sticks and triggers, should this ever need to be done.

Performance

Second to comfort is that if the performance of a controller is no good then the gaming experience is going to be no good. Once again, the X05 impressed me here. I tried Bluetooth first as this is an area where many controllers, even expensive ones, fail to deliver consistent stability or only offer 125Hz.

The X05 was able to poll at 250Hz over Bluetooth and maintain respectable latency between each polling event. Likewise, the 2.4GHz dongle further improved that with even tighter polling intervals. Wired mode is rated at 1000Hz and as with almost all controllers like these, is the most performant.

EasySMX say the X05 has a ceramic chip antenna which helps improve latency and stability. There's some weight to that claim going by the performance I'm seeing and measuring.

The thing to note here is that across all connection methods, the polling and latency between polling events is low enough anyway that regardless of which you choose, the gaming experience is never impacted negatively.

As a result, I saw no obvious difference in playing games, the above GIF shows a 240fps recording on a 175Hz OLED using the X05 via Bluetooth. The GIF is slowed to 1/4 speed at 60fps (the max framerate possible online) to capture the delay from press to action on-screen. This delay is not visible to my eye no matter how many times I try to spot it in the flesh, even in fast-paced titles.

I then fired up Mario Kart 8 and was able to do everything I normally would without any adverse glitches or issue over Bluetooth.

The accuracy of the sticks and dead zone return is perfectly calibrated from the factory. Loading up GamePadTester revealed excellent results for circularity and competing with controllers costing twice the price.

Fake circles!

In recent days it has been drawn to my attention thanks to members of the r/controller reddit community that circularity tests showing average accuracy errors of 0.x% are not entirely telling the whole truth. The reason for this is that many controller makers now buffer/filter the joysticks to get to this figure, which means a potentially large chunk of available stick usable area is clamped out by the filtering. The figures look good for PR purposes, but serve no use to gamers.

This ultimately means that in games that can make use of this extra stick movement cannot do so, resulting in reduced capability in those games.

Around the same time I accidentally discovered that on the EasySMX X05 (and other models) you can disable the fake circle filter by holding the function button (O) and pressing L3 (left stick click). This results in the following results when re-running Gamepad Tester:

My research led me to learn that around 10% is the kind of result we should be expecting to see out of the box, and anywhere between 5-10% for a manually calibrated stick in DIY implementations (for example, PS5 controllers modified to use hall effect sticks).

I re-tested the EasySMX X10 for comparison and that achieved 14% error, which aligns with my original findings that the X05 has much better hall effect stick performance thanks to the natural evolution of the technology and lessons learned by the manufacturer.

From here onward all of my controller reviews will apply focus in this area, if circle filtering cannot be disabled then this will affect the final verdict score.

Conclusion

Budget in price only... The more expensive X10 became my go-to games controller earlier in the year, it beat much more expensive controllers such as the Gulikit KK3 Max yet cost half as much.

Now, the X05 joins the X10 as a stablemate. There are times that I just want to play with a controller with a different feel, and between both of them, this desire is satisfied. The X10 offers excellent feel thanks to the mechanical face buttons, the X05 offers the same sort of feel but by good implementation of membrane buttons instead.

I like the D-pad too, it's large but not mushy like membrane D-pads typically tend to be. I've said it already in this review, but everything on the X05 (aside from the missing trigger surface texture) seems very well judged, and even the trigger surface texture is going to come down to an individual preference on my part so I can't really knock it for that.

There are no official details that I could find about what the battery life is supposed to be, but in my 2 weeks of playing, the red flashing light has yet to come on, and going by the battery life of the X10, if they are similar, then I predict a whole month of casual gaming is going to be possible on one charge.

On top of that, connection stability via 2.4GHz and Bluetooth has been stellar.

The joystick caps that come bundled with the package are also a nice touch, although why they are football themed, I don't know. They offer a larger grip area and raise the height of the sticks a few millimetres.

Keen eyes may have noticed from the specs table that this controller uses a Ternary Lithium battery, I had no idea what this was so did a bit of reading. Better longevity and reliability is the gist of it from what I could gather, not that standard LiPo cells were unreliable for game controllers anyway, though. I suspect the change in decision was cost related. Ultimately, this doesn't affect us users as the performance appears to be the same.

I genuinely think this just might be the bargain controller of the year. This is going to be my first perfect score review. There really is not a single score-reducing fault I can find with this controller. If I was to nitpick then I guess I could say that the USB cable supplied isn't branded or lightweight, but again, the price!

And there we have it, 10/10.

Update - 2024.08.01

New findings have been made regarding stick accuracy and circularity measurements. A new section to this review has been added called Fake circles! where the matter is discussed in detail.