so ive been building my own quads for a few years but honestly im getting a bit tired of the whole process, the sourcing parts, waiting on stuff from banggood, soldering at midnight, you know how it is. been thinking about just grabbing something prebuilt that i can actually fly without spending two weekends on it first.

been looking at the Nazgul Evoque mostly because i see it everywhere but i genuinely dont know if thats just because its been around forever or if its actually still competitive. my buddy keeps telling me to look at the Diatone Roma F5 instead but he also runs Crossfire on everything and has opinions about literally every piece of gear so i take his advice with a grain of salt sometimes.

mostly doing freestyle, some light proximity stuff, not racing. running DJI O3 right now on my builds so ideally something that comes with that already or at least is set up for it without too much hassle. budget is around 250-300 USD give or take. anyone been flying prebuilts recently that can give me an honest take?

the Nazgul Evoque is still solid honestly, i grabbed one about 6 months ago for a travel quad and it's held up fine. the pids out of the box were a bit sluggish for my taste, felt kinda locked and not very responsive on quick direction changes, but half an hour in betaflight and it was flying way better. they ship it pretty conservatively tuned which i get because they dont want noobs flipping out that it's twitchy but if you actually know what youre doing its easy enough to dial in.

one thing i will say is check what version you're getting because the motor specs changed between batches and some of the earlier runs had ESC issues that iflight were pretty quiet about. mine has been fine but ive seen a few people on here and rcgroups mention desyncs on hard throttle punches before they updated firmware.

for O3 specifically it works but you'll need to swap the air unit yourself on most versions, they dont come with it installed unless you pay for the specific DJI variant which bumps the price up quite a bit. might actually be worth just looking at the BetaFPV Pavo series if O3 integration is a priority, they've been doing that really cleanly lately.

i got a Roma F5 earlier this year and tbh your friend isnt wrong, its a pretty nice quad. flies well stock and the build quality feels a step above what i expected for the price. that said i did have to reflash the FC because it came with some weird Diatone specific betaflight fork that i wasnt a fan of, took maybe 20 mins to get a clean build on it and it was noticeably better after.

cant really speak to the O3 side of things since im still on analog but from what ive seen in videos it mounts up clean. just dont drop it on concrete immediately like i did lol, the arms are not indestructible