New chain and cassette time, the above two are similar price online £40-£44, is the SRAM better in some way than XT? It’s RRP is a fair bit higher. Probably going to go with a KMC X9L chain for silvery shiny ease of cleaning.

Virtually no difference. Shimano may be a tad smoother shifting and may last a tad longer IMO, but that’s more of a gut feeling than anything I can really quanitfy 🙂

SRAM comes with a pretty coloured spider that you can’t really see…

Shimano definitely lasts longer. Ignore the RRP on the SRAM, it’s very misleading.

And there’s next to naff all in it weight wise either, couple of grammes either way perhaps.

Just go for the cheaper?

Had this choice myself only two weeks ago. I couldn’t find anything to really separate the two so opted for XT as the guaranteed to be fine option. As said ignore RRP, it’s what you are paying that’s important not some hypothetical RRP.

Seem to have migrated onto using SLX myself, good price saving for not an awful lot of weight, and you can swap over the lockring to close the gap a bit. Performance is identical other than the extra weight.

Good point, weight was near as damit the same as the SLX cassette I took off. No idea how much cheaper an SLX cassette would be though.

Iv’e got a near mint XT 11-32 9spd cassette that I am just about to put on the classifieds. Its from my spare wheel that has seen very few miles.
£25 posted 1st class recorded 8)

Sram is prettier and i think a few grammes lighter but from my experience xt lasts a good bit better. Most of my kit is xtr but i always buy xt cassetes for this reason.