Unfortunately, a forum member tested those and they were unusable—too weak. Which is sad anyways.
Quick summary of my long rambling: HPA will always perform better, but the entry cost of HPA is always higher than AEGs (I’m talking entry level stuff here, not Krytacs and crap).
I understand why people think HPA costs more. The upfront costs for the expensive engines (obviously Polarstars cost tons more than the mechanical versions), regulators, tanks, etc, makes your Evike shopping cart look pretty big… until you get sucked into AEG upgrades.
There are two kinds of upgraded AEG: budget and fancy. I can’t in any way claim to be some sort of AEG martyr—$800 worth of HPA will absolutely perform better than $800 worth of Krytac LVOA and parts. However, I find there is still something to be said for cheaper AEGs. For max performance, HPA will always win, because of the very high limits of the platform, but if we start talking about performance for the
money than AEGs start to have a chance.
The issue with DSG ime is that the low cylinder volume hurts you playing outdoors. If you play indoors, ignore this section, but for me as an outdoor player it does matter, so that limits my choice of primary to SSG. I have built a DSG (albeit a slow one), and to throw in my own two cents, it wasn’t harder than an SSG, though I didn’t explore the full difficulty level. Some of the parts were absolutely under more stress though. For example, I changed the build from SSG to DSG and kept the piston, a supercore 3/4 metal rack piston. Despite holding up beautifully to my 37 RPS SSG, the piston failed almost instantly in the 37 RPS DSG, thanks to the stronger spring stripping the plastic pickup.
But, sticking with SSG; you can never achieve the pure level of trigger response and full auto speed that HPA and DSGs have, without some ungodly teching, so going for equal performance is out of the question. However, I can take a $150-200 stock AEG, put ~$100 of parts in it, and bring the (outdoors) competitive functionality up to 85% of HPA. Some guns may only take a couple of choice parts. Diminishing returns kicks in strongly after this, but with a good base gun and some decent teching you can have an excellent replica for ~$300. Say $40 for a quality battery and digital smart charger. So for $340 ish, give or take a wide margin, you can put yourself together a really good AEG setup that can probably have some nice elements to it. For example, I can take a stock Arcturus M4 variant for $200, put 13:1 gears, a PDI W-hold hop rubber, and still have enough money out of my $100 for a Perun Hybrid.
The question then becomes, how much do the cheapest HPA setups cost? Along with tank, line, and reg, is it even possible to buy a new gun and engine along with everything you need? Obviously used items are an option, but I thought I’d keep my comparison to new replicas and parts.
I know a guy who uses a ~$100 Cyma M4 as his primary. Aside from the outsides feeling like a toy, the thing is really good for the price. It’s well shimmed, does 20 RPS on an 11.1v (excellent idea, right??), and after a half hour of labor to do my ”flathop” mod, it floats BBs as good as anything. His battery and charger cost $25, so for $125 and some work he has a decent replica. There are certainly some downsides, but could you ever build an HPA setup for under $125? Even if you were machining parts yourself?
I don’t go HPA myself for two reasons; first I love tinkering, as Jimps said, specifically with motors and gears and nozzles and such. Second, I don’t have anywhere in the vicinity where I could fill my tanks, so unless I want to own my own compressor, I couldn’t economically make it work anyways.
