Trying To Decide Between GPX 5000 Or GPX 6000...

[Gaustad18]

On 3/23/2023 at 11:40 AM, phrunt said:

A 1 gram target is an easy find for a 5000 that's for sure.  I don't know how the US market is going but if 5000's are going cheaper on the second hand market due to upgrades to the 6000 then it may make sense to go with a 5000, as it's widely acknowledged the 5000 can handle difficult ground and hot rocks significantly better than the 6000, the 6000 geared towards tiny targets I guess has side effects in that regard but in saying that, the 5000 can pick up very small targets, I can't remember my smallest nugget with the older model GPX but I'm sure it was down to 0.05 of a gram type size with a spiral coil.  .1 of a gram and over is where it really starts to go well.   Don't dismiss the 4500 either if you find one at the right price.

Hey Phrunt, a couple more options just came up for me. A friend of mine may be selling his 4500, and I could get a good deal on it. There's also a nice 4500 on ebay that is at a good price too. I would save a decent chunk of change here by getting the 4500 over the 5000. In your experience, how would you compare these 2 detectors? I know the 5000 has some additional soil settings, but how does the 4500 truly stack up against it? Do both machines run fine in hotter ground?

[phrunt]

As fine gold is one of the settings you will miss that's probably not too big of a deal as it's ideal purpose is finding very small gold in difficult soils, and I am guessing the meteorites you want to find aren't going to be in the very low end of the sub gram weight.

Older 4500's tend to run a bit more rough on the threshold than the newer 4500's which seem to be based off the newer 5000 hardware, and the newer ones appear to run similar to the 5000 with that, my older 4500 was much more wild to tame than my 5000 is.

How old is the 4500 you would be looking at? Some prefer the older Australian made ones as it's thought they maybe slightly more sensitive/deeper than the newer Malaysian made ones, how much of that is a placebo and based upon the theory the older ones run full power and the newer ones have been tamed to make them more stable.  I've done some pretty good testing on my older Aussie 4500 and the newer Malaysian 5000 and couldn't overly find a performance difference in that regard in my soils.

The Enhanced timing was slightly improved on the 5000 too over the 4500 which is a timing often used in difficult soils. 

I don't hunt in very difficult ground so can't tell you exactly how much difference there is, but the 4500 was a very successful detector and appears to have very good difficult soil handling, it sure handles the difficult hot rocks in my area very well compared to more modern detectors like the 6000 or even 7000.