Getting real direct drive onto a PlayStation has always meant one name and one price: a Fanatec GT DD Pro, bought at Fanatec money. The T598P is Thrustmaster’s answer, and it comes in from below. Same console licence, a different motor entirely, and a servo base that lands at £349.99 - roughly $425 - against the GT DD Pro’s starting price. The question this base has to answer is not whether 5 Nm is strong. It is whether the cheapest legal route onto PS5 direct drive is a compromise you will regret, or a bargain.
I haven’t had a T598P on my own rig - what follows is distilled from the launch and long-term reviewers I trust, Thrustmaster’s own documentation, and the owner reports that have piled up since the base went on sale.
What it gets right
Start with the thing that actually matters here: the licence. The T598P is officially licensed by Sony and runs on PS5, PS4 and PC. That is a short list to be on. Direct drive on PlayStation is otherwise a Fanatec-only club, so a base that gets you in for £349.99 is doing something almost nothing else does at the price.
The motor is not a marketing rename either. Thrustmaster calls it Direct Axial Drive, and it is a real axial-flux design built with a stator-tech partner, with the magnets aligned on the same axis as the wheel shaft rather than around it. The practical upshot is a motor that produces its torque with less material and, Thrustmaster says, cuts cogging by more than 99 percent. What comes through to your hands is a clean signal, and reviewers who came to it from belt-driven wheels kept landing on the same word: smooth. The feedback arrives without the faint notchiness that firmware has to scrub out of a cheaper radial motor.
Then there is the overshoot. The 5 Nm is constant, but the axial design can briefly push well past it - Thrustmaster quotes +100 percent, so peaks land nearer 10 Nm for the moment you need them. Under normal cornering it feels like the 5 to 6 Nm base it is. Kick the back out, and it bursts into life with a jolt of torque that is genuinely quick to arrive. More than one reviewer found themselves catching slides they would normally have lost, purely because the reaction time is so short. It is not the same as owning ten sustained Newton metres, and the bursts are brief. But as a way to make a low-torque base feel alive, it works.
Worth saying plainly, though: this is still a 5 Nm base. The overshoot flatters it in the moments it fires, and does nothing for the long, loaded corner where a heavier motor keeps pulling.
Build and hardware detail
The first thing you notice is the shape. The axial motor is wide and short rather than long, which makes the housing tall - around 320 mm - and it sits up between you and the screen. On a proper rig with an adjustable monitor that is a non-issue. On a compact cockpit or a desk it is a real one, and reviewers testing it consistently had to raise the monitor or push it back to see the bottom of the picture. Measure before you buy.
Mounting is four bottom bolts, and it does not always line up. At least two reviewers found the base’s own bolt pattern did not match their rig plate, and reached for the metal adapter plate Thrustmaster includes, which has its own holes and sat correctly on rigs the base alone would not. That plate is also the table clamp mount, so if you are running on a desk the clamp comes in the box - pedals on the floor with the supplied carpet grips, and you are racing.
The quick release is Thrustmaster’s new Direct Drive standard, and it is the good kind of upgrade. Lift the lever, slide the rim in, drop it back down, and it holds firm with a clean click. It also carries the on-the-fly platform switching that older Thrustmaster wheels needed a physical switch for. The catch is backward compatibility: older Thrustmaster rims do not fit the new release without an adapter or upgrade kit, at roughly £30 to £35 a wheel, and owners with a shelf of SF1000 and Ferrari rims should price that in before assuming everything carries over.
Round the back sits a 98 W power brick, a USB-C link to the console or PC, and ports for pedals, a shifter or handbrake. One quirk worth knowing: the pedals have to go into the correct, enabled port or the whole base simply will not run - a detail that has cost owners an evening of confused troubleshooting. The little Race Dash screen on top shows gear, speed and flags where the game supports it, and doubles as the settings menu, which on a console is a real help given there is no desktop app to lean on.
The bundle rim, if you buy the full kit rather than the base alone, is the weak spot. It looks fine and the magnetic paddles are crisp, but it is mostly plastic, the button count is thin, and reviewers were blunt about it feeling like a toy next to the base it clips onto. The base itself feels solid and hefty. The rim is where the price shows.
FFB character
The signature of this base is immediacy. Low latency plus the lack of cogging means weight transfer, grip changes and the moment a slide starts all reach your hands fast, with a clarity that reviewers rate as one of the best things about it. The overshoot then layers strength on top in bursts. Together they give the T598P a feeling of speed and reactivity that punches above a plain 5 Nm rating, even if it never feels like a flagship for a whole lap.
Where the consensus turns critical is the middle of the range. The strong overshoot peaks and the clean baseline are both there, but the fine texture in between - the constant chatter of a kerb, subtle road surface - reads as muted next to a Moza or a Fanatec. On iRacing in particular, reviewers struggled to make rumble and texture effects come alive the way they can on rival bases, and kerbs land softer than the raw responsiveness would lead you to expect. Road surface detail fares better than kerbs, oddly, but the pattern holds: this base does the big, fast events brilliantly and the small, sustained ones only adequately.
Sim by sim, the picture looks like this. On PlayStation, Gran Turismo 7 is the natural home, and Thrustmaster has worked with Polyphony directly on it - a later firmware update added official GT7 support, though the game still tends to see the base as a different Thrustmaster wheel in its settings. On PC, the harder sims flatter it: iRacing, rFactor 2 and Le Mans Ultimate feed it a cleaner signal and the base comes alive with detail, even if the very finest kerb texture stays elusive. The Gear Jolt effect, which fires a shock through the wheel on every shift, splits opinion - some reviewers turned it to maximum and could not race without it, others found it exaggerated on slower cars. It is adjustable, which is the point.
The tuning itself happens mostly on the base, through the Race Dash. That is a reasonable choice for a console-first product, but it is fiddlier than a desktop app, and the PC software behind it is thin. There is no telemetry-driven force feedback depth of the kind Moza and Fanatec already ship. Thrustmaster is iterating - the Engine Roar firmware update added engine-rev feedback and telemetry improvements - so the base is better now than at launch. It is still catching up.
Problems owners report - and the fixes
Disconnects are the complaint that comes up most, and Thrustmaster has acknowledged the issue. The cause owners keep landing on is mechanical: the weight and movement of the USB cable slowly works the port connection loose. The fix that keeps coming up is just as mechanical - strap or cable-tie the USB and power cables to your rig so the connector cannot move. Owners who do this report the disconnects stop, and there is now a whole community thread dedicated to the routine. If yours drops out even with the cables locked down, that is a support case and a reason to have bought from a retailer with a clean returns policy.
Heat and fade turn up in the longer-term reports. Run the base hard at high settings and the housing gets warm, and a handful of owners describe the force feedback softening over a long session. It is not universal, and the axial motor runs cooler than a comparable radial design, but it belongs on the ledger if you race two-hour stints.
The pedal port quirk is worth repeating because it catches people out: plug the pedals into the wrong socket and the base will not power up at all. Check the enabled port first if a new unit seems dead.
Then there is the rim and the ecosystem. The stock wheel is cheap, and the answer is to treat the base as the thing you are actually buying and upgrade the rim later - the Thrustmaster add-on catalogue is broad, and the promised Raceline load-cell brake upgrade has now shipped, so the pedals can grow into a proper three-pedal load-cell set. Just remember the older rims need the Direct Drive adapter, which is the recurring sting for existing Thrustmaster owners.
Who should buy it
If you race on a PlayStation and you want real direct drive without paying Fanatec prices, this is the strongest case in the tier, and it is not close. At £349.99 for the base - or £449.99 / $499.99 for the full bundle with rim and pedals - the T598P undercuts the Fanatec GT DD Pro by a clear margin while sitting on the same short list of console-legal bases. The Fanatec answers with more torque headroom, deeper software and the bigger rim catalogue; the Thrustmaster answers with the price and the clean axial feel. On PlayStation, that is usually a budget decision, and the T598P is built to win it.
If you are on PC, the calculation flips. The Moza R5 lands at similar money with more feel-per-pound and a deeper software stack, and it has no console licence to pay for. Thrustmaster’s own T818 gives you 10 Nm and the SF1000 rim line if you want more torque in the family. And if you want sustained weight rather than 5 Nm plus overshoot, the Moza R9 V3 is the honest step up. The T598P’s console licence is worth nothing to a PC-only buyer, and without it the value argument softens.
Don’t buy it expecting flagship torque, or the last word in kerb detail, or software that rivals the PC brands. Buy it because it is the cheapest legal way onto PlayStation direct drive, the axial motor feels clean and quick, and the compromises are mostly in the rim you can replace and the software that is still improving.
So: is the cheapest route onto PS5 direct drive a compromise you will regret? For a console driver buying their first direct drive base, the licence and the price point the same way, and the axial motor is more than a gimmick. The things you give up - a tall housing, a plastic stock rim, thin software and a 5 Nm ceiling that only the overshoot papers over - are the things a PlayStation buyer at this price was always going to give up somewhere.