so ive been building my own quads for like 3 years now and honestly im just tired of the whole process, sourcing parts, waiting on shipping from china, soldering for 4 hours only to have some esc go up in smoke on the first flight. thinking about just grabbing a prebuilt for once and the Nazgul Evoque keeps coming up. but i cant tell if its still competitive or if everyone moved on to something else while i wasnt paying attention.

mainly flying freestyle, occasional light cinematic stuff but nothing serious. dont care about the HD system, id probably swap to my own DJI O3 setup anyway. so really just looking at the frame, motors, and how it flies stock before any tuning. anyone running one recently or should i be looking at something else in that price range

had a Nazgul5 v2 for about 8 months before i binned it pretty hard into a concrete barrier, frame cracked but honestly held up better than i expected. stock tune was actually decent out of the box, better than i thought it would be coming from a prebuilt. motors run a little warm if you push it hard for extended sessions but nothing crazy. only thing i changed right away was the betaflight filter settings, the stock filtering felt a bit heavy and was adding latency you could feel in the sticks. took maybe an hour of tuning to get it where i wanted.

that said the price has crept up and at current pricing id probably look at the BetaFPV Aquila or even the Flywoo Explorer depending on what you want. if you're deadset on a 5inch freestyle thing though the Nazgul is still a solid buy, just dont expect it to feel like your own build right out of the box

i switched to prebuilts like a year ago and havent looked back honestly. less time in the shop more time flying. i got the Nazgul Evoque F5D and its been pretty good, the digital version obviously but like you said you can swap that out. the frame geometry is nice for freestyle, good camera angle options. my only gripe is the stack, its fine but nothing special and if something fries youre dealing with their proprietary mounting sometimes which is annoying.

also just throwing it out there ? the Diatone Roma F5 is worth a look if you havent already, some guys in my local group swear by it over the Nazgul