Pistol Review: Sig Sauer P320 Xten
Your editor recently acquired a Sig P320 XTEN here are his thoughts on it. The XTEN is a 10mm variant of Sig’s flagship P320 series.
I’d give you MSRP, as I usually do, but Sig doesn’t list that on their site, so instead I’ll give you the current average at GunBroker: $900. That $900 gets you the gun, 3 day Xray night sights, a hard case, the usual manuals and a plastic cleaning rod and nylon brush.
Being 10mm, it is a bit larger than the standard 320. It has a 5 in carbon steel barrel nestled in the Nitron finished stainless slide. It is 8.5 in length, 1.3 in wide and 5.6 in tall. It weighs in at 33 ounces.
The slide on the XTEN is pre-cut for a red dot sight and I installed Leupold DeltaPoint Pro. I happened to have this optic kicking around, it came on my carry gun, a Glock 43X MOS. I switched it for a Sig Romeo Zero over fitment issues. The one I have mounted is a 2.5 MOA dot. The DeltaPoint Pro is a robust and reliable optic, if a bit on the spendy side at $449. I am a fan of the armor over the lens housing, it promises durability.
The controls are well placed. The slide release is ambi, and the mag release can be switched to either side. The only issue I have is the straight trigger, but that’s a very minor gripe.
At the range the XTEN is fun to shoot and pretty accurate. Since finally being able to pick it up (and that’s a whole other adventure) I’ve put about 400 rounds through the pistol.
Recoil is reasonable, the 2+ pounds of weight helps, with everything but the hottest loads I fired. Those hot rounds were some 200 gr hardcast handloads I put together. They left the barrel at 1200 fps. That load barked a bit.
I only had one gun related hiccup while shooting the XTEN, there was a failure to feed while doing a drill. I could not get it to repeat and don’t know what actually happened other than the slide closed on an empty chamber with ammo in the mag. Could it have been deus ex machina? I suppose. Regardless It only happened once and has not happened since.
Accuracy was good, but nothing spectacular, not that I expected match performance. I saw the greatest disparity between the FMJ loads. Some, but not all, of the white box Winchester I shot did not want to group no matter what I did. Meanwhile the Armscor I shot – despite smelling funny – gave great groups of around 2.25 in at 10m. The odd lots of Aguila I happened to have shot somewhere in-between.
The defensive and hunting ammo I shot averaged around 2.25 in at 10 meters. The best group I shot came from the remains of a box of older 180 gr Cor-Bon. Those came in at 1.50 in. The hardcast handloads referenced earlier averaged 2 in.
There is a reason for the hardcast. While this pistol is never going to be my EDC gun it will be my go-to for bear country. Hardcast flatnosed projectiles out of a 10mm pistol are perfect bear medicine.
That leads me to the last section of this review. What is this gun good for? Well, it is a lot of fun to shoot. It is also a very capable hunting rig. The 10mm cartridge has the power to take game up to the size of deer and black bear cleanly with proper bullet selection.
If you are a larger person, you might be able to conceal the XTEN. It is larger and heavier than a 1911. I might actually consider carrying it in the winter months here if it weren’t so heavy.
