How GuliKit’s ES Pro is quietly dismantling everything we thought we knew about gaming peripherals.
There’s a revolution happening in gaming hardware and most people are missing it entirely. It’s not coming from Microsoft, Sony, or Razer. It’s coming from a brand most people have never heard of, sold on AliExpress, for forty dollars.
The GuliKit ES Pro High-Speed Controller isn’t trying to be a budget Xbox clone. It’s making a serious engineering argument that the entire premium controller market has been charging a fortune while ignoring the fundamentals. And from a purely technical standpoint, it’s winning that argument.
The Problem Nobody Talks About Honestly
Stick drift. You know it. You’ve lived it. That slow, maddening moment when your character starts moving on its own, your crosshair drifts mid-fight, and you realise you’re looking at another $60 or $70 replacement.
Every first-party controller from Microsoft and Sony uses carbon-film potentiometers inside each joystick. A physical wiper grinds across a resistive track every time you move the stick, measuring position through friction. Manufacturers rate these components at roughly one to two million cycles before failure, which sounds generous until you realise a single gaming session involves thousands of stick movements per hour.
GuliKit decided to stop the clock entirely.
The Physics Upgrade: TMR Sensors
Most drift-free controllers entering the market recently use Hall Effect sensors, a contactless magnetic technology that reads stick position without physical wear. A genuine improvement over potentiometers.
The ES Pro goes further. It uses Tunnel Magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors, operating on quantum mechanical principles that make standard Hall Effect look like a rough draft.
Inside a TMR sensor, two ferromagnetic layers are separated by an insulating barrier so thin that electrons tunnel through it. The resistance of this junction changes dramatically based on the relative orientation of those layers, one of which rotates in response to your joystick magnet. The result is extraordinarily precise readings with almost zero signal noise.
In practical terms: 4,000 levels of resolution on each axis. A standard Xbox or PlayStation controller’s potentiometer delivers somewhere between 512 and 1,024 steps. GuliKit’s own Hall Effect models cap around 2,200. The ES Pro nearly doubles that again.
That resolution gap matters most to competitive FPS players. Micro-adjustments near the centre of the stick, the kind you make when tracking a moving target, demand granularity most controllers can’t provide. It also eliminates stick tremor, the low-level sensor noise that forces game engines to apply dead zones, which in turn reduce fine control. As a bonus that rarely gets mentioned, TMR sensors draw significantly less power than Hall Effect alternatives, translating directly into better battery life and higher polling rates.
The Speed Story: What Polling Rate Actually Means
GuliKit markets the ES Pro as the world’s fastest wireless gaming controller, and the numbers back that up.
In wired mode over USB-C, it polls at 1,000 Hz with an average input latency of 1.87 milliseconds. Wirelessly, it hits 730 Hz at 3.25 ms. A standard Xbox Series X controller communicates wirelessly at 125 Hz, with latency sitting between 8 and 10 ms.
The inevitable pushback is that 1,000 Hz is faster than most monitors can display frames. So why does it matter? The answer is input jitter. At 1,000 Hz, the game engine queries your controller and receives data that is at most 1 ms old. At 125 Hz, that data could be nearly 8 ms stale. The ES Pro’s data is always fresh when the frame needs it, which players experience as a controller that simply feels more responsive, even if they can’t consciously measure the difference.
What It’s Actually Like to Use
Testing the ES Pro in Helldivers 2 (a game demanding fast, complex d-pad sequences alongside precise movement) reveals something interesting. The latency advantage is real but subtle. The more immediate transformation is the complete elimination of ghost inputs and drift that slowly corrupts sessions on ageing first-party controllers.
What players notice first isn’t the speed. It’s the silence. The stick does exactly what you tell it to, nothing more, and it does so indefinitely.
The controller uses an asymmetric stick layout matching the Xbox design family, with textured rubber on the handles and rear shell for grip. Build quality is clean and purposeful rather than flashy.
There are legitimate criticisms. The rear shell has sharper indentations near the trigger area that can press uncomfortably into larger hands during long sessions. The ABXY buttons feel shallower than a standard Xbox controller to some users, less click and more push. The circular d-pad works well for shooters and 8-directional inputs, but fighting game players may miss the distinct cross-separation they rely on for precise quarter-circle motions.
Where to Buy
Regional links below so you’re always getting the best price and shipping option for your location.
USA: Shop ES Pro on AliExpress UK: Shop ES Pro on AliExpress Western Europe: Shop ES Pro on AliExpress Eastern Europe: Shop ES Pro on AliExpress
No App Required
GuliKit commits completely to hardware-level customisation. Where the Xbox Elite and Razer Wolverine require companion apps, the ES Pro handles everything through a dedicated Settings button combined with other inputs.
You can swap between Xbox and Nintendo button layouts (solving the eternal A/B inversion headache for cross-platform players), choose from three joystick sensitivity curves, enable anti-snapback filtering for platform fighters, adjust vibration intensity, configure turbo modes, and calibrate sticks and gyroscope without ever touching a computer. The firmware update process is equally elegant: the controller mounts as a USB drive and you drag a .bin file onto it. No launcher, no account, no mandatory update screen.
Recent firmware updates have addressed Super Smash Bros.-specific snapback behaviour, Switch wake-up reconnection bugs, and trigger synchronisation timing, suggesting active engineering attention rather than abandoned post-launch support.
The Console Limitation (And Why It Mostly Doesn’t Matter)
The ES Pro does not natively authenticate with Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5. Microsoft and Sony use proprietary security chips to validate controllers and GuliKit doesn’t license them. To use the ES Pro on those consoles, you need a Hyperlink 2 or Goku adapter dongle, which comes included in the $40 bundle.
For PC and Nintendo Switch users, this is completely irrelevant. For console-primary players, it’s a real consideration, though the maths still favours the ES Pro. The controller plus adapter runs around $40 versus $60 to $70 for a first-party pad that will drift. You can also order it without the dongle for around $30 if you don’t need the adapter options.
Over at Pale Shadow Gaming, where the focus is on delivering the best gaming experience across platforms (from Destiny playthroughs to UHD recordings), the emphasis is always on the moments that matter, not the gear that gets in the way. A controller that simply works, every session, without drift or ghost inputs, fits that philosophy perfectly.
The Actual Price-to-Performance Calculation
At $40, the GuliKit ES Pro costs little more than half a standard Xbox controller. It delivers measurably superior input resolution, lower latency, and removes the failure mechanism responsible for the most common reason people replace controllers in the first place.
For the price of one DualSense Edge, you could equip five players with ES Pro controllers that outperform it in every metric that directly affects gameplay.
This isn’t a budget controller punching above its weight. It’s an engineering argument that the premium controller market has been overcharging for aesthetics while ignoring the fundamentals, and a forty dollar controller from a brand you’ve never heard of just called them out.
Watch the full demo and unboxing here: YouTube
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