Sim-X DEFENSECORE 9mm Ammunition Test
- Graham Baates
- 3 minutes ago
- 5 min read
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A couple years ago I encountered Sim-X Ammunition at SHOT show and had a good conversation with them. Their ammunition appeared to be a rival to Liberty Ammunition. Competition in the marketplace benefits us consumers so I was excited to get some in for testing. Sim-X never sent ammunition and I simply got busy with other projects, forgetting about the brand. That is until recently when a Patron asked for my thoughts on the ammunition and offered to send some for review.
This review was made possible by that generous Patron. The only role Sim-X played in making this review possible was producing an interesting load. My hope was that Sim-X could be a lower-cost alternative to Liberty Ammunition for those looking to punch above their caliber "weight" and have a projectile much less likely to leave the bad guy than a standard hollow point.
The claim from Sim-X's website:
"DEFENSECORE from SIM-X is the first of its kind ammunition for every-day carry, combining hyper-velocity, performance recoil, and optimized on target, in-target terminal performance when needed most. The patented synthetic polymer core is perfectly married to the proprietary jacket, achieving outstanding performance in all handguns in the areas that matter most. The 9mm offers an astounding 500+ foot pounds of energy at the muzzle... Something previously unheard of in any small pistol round. DEFENSECORE helps put devastating rounds on target, in critical situations where it matters the most."
*NOTE: Although not present on the website at the time this was written, nor in a usual place on the packaging, the box does contain one line warning of "+p Power".
Prices around the web as of date the article was written
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The Test: SAAMI specifies a 4" test barrel for 9mm ammunition and so that must be included to see if we get "2,250+fps" but also today's shooters tend to carry shorter barrels. I was curious to see what the losses were for shorter barrels including ported options which have been popular lately. We know porting costs velocity, but how much depends on the load and how much of its potential speed has been reached before pressure is lost at the port. I also wanted to include a longer-than-standard barrel as I did in the Liberty Ammunition test, but opted to keep it conservative this time with just a 5".
5 pistols of known good quality and different barrel lengths (linked to reviews)
SAR9 SC Gen 3 3.1"
Canik METE MC9 Prime 3.6" (ported)
Tisas PX-9 Duty Comp 4" (ported)
5 shots through each pistol on a target at 7 yards
Velocity averaged and muzzle energy calculated.
No gel testing included as I've come to find that no matter what protocol is used, including FBI standards, there are plenty of arguments as to why that test isn't a good representation of what the projectile would do in living flesh.
See the process shot for shot in the video below. Rumble Link
Results as you saw were not quite what was advertised. We failed to acheive the advertised velocity with the 5" Grand Power getting closest with 96% of the speed, but the XCalibur is a competition gun, not your average carry or defensive gun. My testing was conducted on a cool day, but the ammunition was stored indoors, transported in a warm car, and brough out only moment prior to testing. Altitude at my test range is about 300'. It is possible that if this ammunition is used in the mountains of Colorado on a hot day it might reach advertised velocity. In contrast, Liberty Ammunition exceeded advertised velocity, even from shorter barrels and on a colder day at the same range.
While this is not encouraging, one thing we do not know as no ammunition manufacturer dare publishes, is what the velocity window is within which the projectile will perform as intended. Without knowing performance windows the best we can do is seek ammunition that performs as advertised in order to trust the rest of the claimed abilities.
By the numbers here's how each gun did compared to the advertised velocity. Encouraging to fans of ported guns is that with this load there was minimal loss between the ported Tisas PX-9 Duty Comp and the complete 4" barrel of the Rost Martin RM1C.
Although we did not reach advertised energy, we can see that Sim-X DEFENSECORE does hir harder than the previously-tested Sig V-Crown offerings, and harder than some other loads tested in sub-4" barrels.
Weight savings can be a factor in higher-capacity guns, but 15 rounds of lighter-weight Liberty Ammunition only saved about 2 ounces over 15 rounds of 115gr (4.2oz vs 6.1oz respectively); about enough to offset the weight of a mounted red dot. 15 rounds of Sim-X 45gr saves 0.2oz over Liberty Ammunition; roughly the weight of a nickel.
One other potential consideration is Sim-X's use of a polymer insert as the core of the round. I'd like to assume any issue has been engineered out, but I wonder how well that polymer remains in place and retains shape during peak pressure. I bring this up because as shown in the video, each string of five shots had at least one round of outlying velocity which also printed differently in the group. I am not a Ransom Rest and so that might have been coincidental with human error, but the correlation between velocity difference and impact location difference is difficult to ignore.
Conclusion: Is Sim-X a lower-cost alternative to Liberty Ammunition? Maybe, but only if we accept that it's also proportionally lower quality. I understand Liberty Ammunition is not inexpensive, I've bought a lot of it, but it's also not cheap. I don't think Sim-X is "cheap" either, and at about $1 / round is priced about like traditional hollow points, but between exaggerated marketing claims, the way the company has interacted with me personally in the past, and the questionably-discrete "+p power" labeling, I'm not comfortable trusting anything else about the ammunition at this time. On a positive note, we have seen that Sim-X does hit harder than a conventional load.