It isn’t often that a new ammunition manufacturer comes onto the market, and even more rare is one that makes claims as big as Eagle Eye. They don’t simply claim to be “match grade” and then leave you gessing as to what that means, they print their guarantee right on the box: 1/2 MoA groups from every box of ammunition. It’s a bold claim, and they sent me home with a couple boxes of ammunition confident that the product will speak for itself. I put it through the standard ammunition testing that we do here, and the results are pretty cool.

We have already looked a little at the background of this ammunition in our first look article, so now it’s time to put it to the test.

To give you a quick refresher on the setup, we run a box of ammunition through the chronograph and analyze the results. I have been using InterQuartile Range (IQR) for the metric to compare everyone, but after talking to the nerds at Eagle Eye I think I’ve finally been convinced to switch to Standard Deviation (StDev) as the metric instead — it gives a better idea of the variability of the ammunition. But just comparing the ammunition to the rest of the stuff I’ve done already wasn’t enough — I wanted to see how well it did against their prime competitor.

Federal Gold medal Match is the gold standard when it comes to precision ammunition — everyone who needs a consistent commercial load uses it. So in order to see how well Eagle Eye performed, I figured it would be best to directly compare it against the best Federal has to offer. Same gun, same chrono, same atmospheric conditions.

I threw in a couple other brands for comparison in the boxplot, but you can already see a clear winner when it comes to the Eagle Eye versus Federal Gold medal Match grudge match. One is clearly superior in both interquartile range and extreme spread, and it ain’t the old guard. Heck, Eagle Eye even beat the best that Hornady has to offer, for those who believe the red box is superior to all else.

A quick note about the Winchester ammunition: upon reflection, I really didn’t have enough data to make a call about that ammo. I only have a few data points compared to the 20 that I have for everyone else, and it isn’t really fair. That’s why you see the outlier in the boxplot — there isn’t enough data to fit that into the bell curve. I’ve removed that ammunition from the charts for now, and will re-add it when I get more data down the road.

Moving to the bar graph, there’s definitely a clear winner. I re-calculated everyone’s scores from IQR to StDev, re-ordered the results based on the new scores, and the results were very surprising. Eagle Eye ammunition is the official top of the chart, clocking in at 20 feet per second standard deviation. As for the best offering Federal has on tap, they could only muster up 23.5 feet per second as their StDev. What’s really funny is that the box of cheap-o Herters ammunition I ran through on a lark had a standard deviation of 21, which is better than Federal Gold Medal Match (and like three times cheaper).

More interesting that Eagle Eye simply being the best: it remains the best (and remains consistent) between different lots of ammunition. Take, for example, these three 100-yard groups. Normally, you would need three rounds from the same lot to make a group that small — variability between different lots of ammunition is too great to be accurate otherwise. But for these three groups, the pro shooters behind Eagle Eye used one round each from three different lots of ammunition to make these three round groups. Center to center these are roughly 1/3 MoA groups, which is better than the 1/2 MoA guaranteed on the box, despite being from different lots. With Eagle Eye you’re not just paying for a box of consistent ammunition, you’re paying for ammunition that will be consistent with itself no matter which two boxes you pick up off the shelves and how long you wait in between shopping trips. You’re always getting the same load with the same consistency and velocity.

Is Eagle Eye Ammunition the most consistent loading of .308 Winchester that we have ever seen? Yep. Is it more consistent than Federal Gold Medal Match? Myth confirmed. It’s really great to see a new ammunition manufacturer who is able to crank out more consistent ammunition than anyone else on the market, and I’m looking forward to how the established ammo manufacturers scramble to respond.