Here at TTAG we take it upon ourselves to spend inordinate amounts of time on the range in order to figure out what’s “the best” out there so that you, our beloved readers, don’t spend your money on utter crap. Today we look at three brands of .223 Remington ammunition: PDX-1, Pierce, and American Eagle . . .
Winchester’s PDX-1 is a 60 grain .223 Rem snack for your AR that we took a peek at a few days ago. It’s not designed to be a “match grade” offering, but is the expected accuracy “head shot” or “center of mass” reliable?
I ran into the guys from Pierce ammunition at the NRA Convention in Pittsburgh, PA. They made a bold claim: that their ammunition is the best out there. Naturally we couldn’t take them at their word, so they send out a box of ammunition for some testing and evaluation. And I must say, the box was very nice. But how did the ammunition stack up against the other “match grade” offerings?
American Eagle is one of the favored brands for those ordering mass quantities of ammunition. It’s cheap, reliable, and brass cased. Which makes sense that this (pictured) 1,000 rounds of ammunition showed up at my door this week. But is it consistent enough to be relied on in a competition?
Inquiring minds need to know, and thankfully I have the answers. With special thanks to the Clark Brothers in Warrenton, V.A. for providing a range while our usual test facility is under repair (I swear I didn’t break it this time), I was able to get some good chronograph readings on everything here. The procedure was set out the first time we did this, and the test rifle remains the trusty ArmaLite M-15 A2 National Match rifle.
Ah boxplots, my best friends. As usual, we include the reigning champion in terms of consistency (Wilson Combat 77gr) for comparison. As you can see all three ammunition brands were much faster than the Wilson Combat, but their bullets also weighed almost half as much. This boxplot rarely tells us all the juicy details until we normalize the data, so let’s go ahead and do that.
The normalization scheme for you math nerds is simply (velocity-average[velocity]), which puts the mean exactly at zero. The rest I think you can figure out for yourselves (smaller = better consistency).
Let’s see where these new additions stack up in terms of the other brands we’ve tested so far.
According to our testing, none of the ammunition we tried is any better than Wolf (the ammo everyone loves to hate). Pierce clocked in around the middle of the pack, and the PDX-1 and American Eagle were less consistent than my handloads. I wasn’t sure that was even possible, but it’s awfully hard to argue against cold hard facts.
Is this inconsistency enough to make you miss a headshot at 10 yards? Probably not. But at 600 yards you can bet that it starts becoming a major factor. Join us next time as we continue our search for the most consistent ammunition in the world.
