Direct drive extruders are typically scarce on budget 3D printers. Recently, Artillery achieved considerable success with its direct-drive-featuring Sidewinder X1, ever so slightly tackling Creality’s hegemony over the large format budget 3D printing sector.

Can Creality, with the CR-10 V3, reassert itself?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Not to beat around the bush, but frankly, the only real change from the Creality CR-10 V2 is the switch from a Bowden extruder to a Titan direct drive, with minor changes to the spool holder and filament run-out sensor to accommodate the switch.

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Direct Drive vs Bowden Extruder: The Differences

Having a direct drive extruder generally offers an easier time loading filament than you might have using a Bowden extruder. Also, you might see better performance when retracting filament, thanks to reduced stringing and oozing.

Due to the change in extruder technologies, the filament spool holder now rests atop the printer’s frame, together with the runout sensor. The arrangement means filament feeds straight down to the print head instead of sideways as would be found on the V2 with its Bowden extruder.

Placing the filament up top eliminates the issue of imbalancing the control box (a frustration of ours with spool placement on Bowden-toting CR-10 models that use the umbilical control box). It could be argued that this extra weight on the top of the frame could introduce Z-wobble in tall prints, but Creality mitigates this with a sturdy brace.

What’s more, the parallel arrangement of both holder and sensor is not ideal. Placing constant strain on the filament thread this could lead to under extrusion and prints failing, especially if the filament is not furled up properly on its spool.

Other than that, the CR-10 V3 is identical to its forebear. It has the same Z-axis-stabilizing cross braces, sturdy aluminum-extrusion build, coated glass print bed, 300 x 300 x 400 mm build volume, and umbilically-attached control unit housing the power brick and controls.

If you already own the CR-10 V2, you can upgrade it to a V3 with the Titan direct drive extruder upgrade.

It would have been nice to see innovations found on other recent Creality printers (even some CR-series machines, such as the CR-6 SE) make it to the CR-10 V3. Be it long-term convenience of belt tensioners, automatic-bed leveling, or a slick touchscreen user interface – anything to help it stand out more.

Although Creality did furnish the CR-10 V3’s print head with space to add a BLTouch auto-bed leveling probe, it would have been nice to see the probe included as standard on the stock V3.

Another drawback of the CR-10 V3 is its umbilically-attached control unit and the mess of cables that come with it. The pause-giving frustration of correctly looming these tendrils to avoid snagging on the moving axes is practically a right of passage.

There’s a sense that the V3 is getting a bit dated. Even the budget options in Creality’s lineup (looking at you, Ender 3 V2) benefit from colorful touchscreens and easy to navigate UIs. Yet again, we wouldn’t have minded if some of the innovations would have carried over to the CR-10 V3. We don’t mind controlling the printer with a rotary knob, but the fistful of chunky spaghetti accompanying the external box sucks. Plus, the cables are quite short, restricting the box’s placement and ease of use.

Setup & Printing

After the initial assembly, the CR-10 V3’s pre-flight preparations – mainly leveling the bed – are equally effortless. However, the somewhat unwieldy user interface falls short compared to machines with colorful touchscreen UIs to tap around.

The same goes for the proprietary slicer software, Creality Slicer, which runs an old version of Cura under the hood. It does the job, but frustrations such as the software’s constant and automatic slicing whenever one variable is changed can be a drag (for you and your computer’s RAM). We recommend using a current install of Cura in the long run for better slicing performance.

Unsurprisingly, given Creality’s hot streak of decent budget printers lately, the CR-10 V3’s print quality is uniformly gratifying. It needed the bare minimum of tinkering on our end to sing.

During our time reviewing the printer, we found little to grumble about in its performance.

Detail renders well on prints of all sizes, and printing up to the full height on offer showed little sign of Z-wobble – something previous CR-10 printers without the cross brace sometimes faced.