Just finish a new primary rifle build and trying to decide on light. Previously I’ve run protac hlx lights and been mostly happy with them but looking for an upgrade on this rifle.

I’m trying to decide between
Malkoff e2xtl 18650.  $250
Modlite plhv2 18650.  $290
M640dft                       $295

My initial thought was the surefire since it’s a surefire and I like the adjustable mount on the new pro scouts but doing some reading it sounds like the sf dual fuels were hot garbage and couldn’t keep up with other brands. Since the turbo came out it sounds like initial reviews were more positive but not much for long term reviews. All of these lights would have a tail cap to start but eventually change to pressure switch. Can anyone help narrow down what would be best route to go or who has experience with these?

There is only one master race.

Malkoff

Surefire 640dfT hands down. better output than both of those lights and the street price is more like $260 shipped. no need to spend more money for another mount either.

It's gonna have better resale and be easier to sell than the other brands.

I’ve got all of those. Same malkoff head, same modlite (it’s my handheld), surefire df640, and I have a first gen cloud rein.

The rein and malkoff are the same, except the rein is a lot warmer light color.

The surefire is powerful and it’s on my main squeeze 13.7, but I prefer that it’s mostly spill.

The modlite has more candela and lumens than all of them, and i like it the best. It’s just got more balls.

The surefire turbo lights are fantastic and the specs blow away the other lights except the new cloud defensive reins. I will eventually add one to my collection.

Turbo.

The Modlite heads can be found on blem sale from time to time for $120. That plus a body, tailcap, and mount of your choice makes for a pretty reasonable price.

you'll like the DF640 turbo, it has a lot of spill while blowing away the competition on candela with both battery types. I believe only cloud defensive has a higher candela light.

even with the $120 modlite blem sales, you are gonna be out $250 before shipping to get a body, tailcap, and mount to make a frankenlight with less output. I have two of these that I'll probably sell to get more 640T's

If you don’t mind me asking where are you seeing the 640dft for that low?

Turbo.

Tried the other brands, the Turbo ended up being my favorite.

After having two cloud rein 3.0s fail me at a Sentinel Concepts low light rifle course and totally ruining a rather pricey training class…along with their trash switches, the Turbo gets the nod.

If you want throw, the Surefire is best. But it is more in line with the Modlite OKW than the PLHv2 which has MUCH more flood. Surefire wins for quality. Definitely gives me a warm fuzzy over Modlite, which I own 4 of, so no hater. Surprisingly prefer the Surefire picatinny version of the pro mount to Arisaka mounts. Lighter than Arisaka mount too. The MLOK version of the pro mount is heavier and sucks for positioning vs the picatinny pro on the top rail, which I did not expect.

Only negative to Surefire head is the length. It is just a hair longer than the other two.

Malkoff is just to weak on lumens to be a contender vs PLHv2, but same throw. The DFT is more throw, but much less flood vs PLHv2. The flood difference is most noticable at medium distances,  where the Surefire outter flood becomes useless and the PLHv2 is not. Up close and indoors the Surefire flood works and the hot spot bounce back illuminates everything great. If you want range though, I prefer less spill as it does not catch closer objects and reflect back constricting your pupil.

Pm'ed

I’ve got the malkoff and tried a buddies cloud stuff.  Bought a 340 turbo.  Fucking sweet light.  

Now I’m looking at x300u turbos to swap everything to.

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The Modlite's candela is hard to beat. I made a hybrid because the Surefire's rail mount is 🤌.

SF deservedly got a lot of flak for falling behind the times for a while and the failure of the first DF lights, but they hit a homerun with the Turbo series and have beat pretty much everyone else except maybe Cloud, but they've had issues with their switches and such while SF has a solid aftermarket locked in for those accessories.

Well palmetto marking down both the 340 and 640 turbo was too much temptation. So guess I’ll have those two to compare.

I have the 340 on a SBR and love it. Obviously on a 10.5" handguard space is a concern. It does impressively well for its small footprint.

Having first hand experience with all three, and also the Cloud Defensive REIN 3.0, the Surefire Turbo and CD offerings reign supreme. I really like the swiveling mount of the Surefire. And while it's not quite as bright/powerful as the REIN 3.0, it is far from being in its shadow. That said, the Modlite and Malkoff are no slouches either. I don't own any Modlites anymore, but still have several Malkoff E2XTL heads with no plans on swapping them out.

I have had the modlite okw and plhv2, the surefire DFT, and the cloud defensive rein 3.0. Avoid cloud defensive like the plague. After owning a Rein 3.0 and 2 MCH lights, all of them have failed and needed warranty(multiple times per light). My modlites and surefires have been completely reliable.

What failed/how? My friends and I have had no issues with Cloud.

Rein 3.0- flickering and then just flat out stopped working. Got sent a new tail cap. Still flickered. Sent the light to cloud and got it back. Still flickered. Got another tail cap, verified it wasn't flickering, and then sold it.

2 MCHs- flickering and going through the new tailcap process right now. Switched batteries, swapped around tailcaps and heads, and cleaned the lights as best as I could. Still having issues.

When I first started using cloud, I thought they were awesome and recommended then to my friends and multiple different departments who then started recommending them to their coworkers. Now, all but one of us have had warranty issues with lights flickering and dying.

They are great lights when they work, but they almost never work.

Sounds like me with my Unity gas caps.

Werkz had a lot of problems with them in their rifle light torture test.

Same issue here, and it ruined a very expensive training class.

Were you using a Reptilia light body?  Not sure why but I recall that being the case.

I’ve got 6 gas caps and they’ve been perfect, but all are on otherwise OEM surefire lights.

Surefire

It did it on Surefire (x2), and Reptilia (x1) bodies. They replaced it with one that works, but could not find any issue with the one I sent them. I've since switched over to Cloud's ecosystem.

I have or have had all the above lights.  If I'm buying today, I'm going Scout Turbo Pro.  The PLHv2 is still 100% serviceable.  Arisaka is always a solid option, especially if you're buying used heads at a discounted price, and is also the lightest weight option for the lw build whores.

I have used all of the lights mentioned and have used them in low light/no light courses both indoors and out. I am selling all of my remaining lights and buying surefire turbos. They blow the competition away when it comes to throw and reliability.

I have 6x Modlites, 2 PLH, 2 PLHv2 and 2 OKWs, a Rein 1.0, a Malkoff E2XT 18650 and both the 640 and 340 Turbos.

I’d highly recommend the turbo as the best option if you can get for less than $300. Comes with a mount, your money ahead.

Sorry to revive this thread, but I have a Surefire M640DFT and I just picked up a Rein 3.0 to give it a shot and see how it is. Could you give me more info on this and what the problem was? Because I hear so many mixed things on these Cloud lights. Some people say they are bullet proof and have never failed them even after much abuse (but they could just be lying or exaggerating lol), and then other people, including a couple other people in this thread, are saying that they fail like crazy compared to the Surefire Turbo's. And/or that, even if their Cloud's don't fail, they still prefer the Turbo over the Rein 3.0.

So what issues exactly were going on with the Rein's? And you verified it wasn't just an issue with the battery jack ring setup? Like, even when you tightened up the ring to get the battery in a good position that will be tight when you screw the head back on, it would still flicker and have issues? I have been having a hard time figuring out which ones actually have problems vs people not setting up the battery jack correctly. If you just try to tighten the jack after the battery is already in, there's no way you're gonna get it tight enough just using fingers. Originally I was tightening it by using a USB plug and a pair of pliers to twist it into place, but then I realized it would be way better and easier to go, by trial and error, changing the amount the jack was twisted in before screwing the head on the light.

Took a bit of calibrating it, where I'd twist it in a lil bit, see if I could thread the head all the way on or not, and then adjust it until I could feel the head's spring loaded contact pushing into the battery and pushing hard against the battery jack, but not so hard that I was damaging the head or anything else when screwing the head down.

So that way I was able to get the jack extremely tight and there's zero chance the jack is going to move under recoil. It's just way too tight, and it still has perfect contact. But you're saying that the lights you had and that you recommended to other people were just straight up failing? And no changes to the battery jack position or anything else would fix it? They would just die completely? I wonder if it's related to how insanely hot they get compared to the Surefire. The surefire basically never gets too hot for me to actually hold the HEAD in my hand, but the Cloud gets so hot that if I tried to hold it by the head I would seriously burn myself. It's also probably not great for the batteries either. Lithium Ion does not do well once it gets to be over like 45° celsius.

And I hope that the other people in this thread who had issues with the Rein's could shed some more light on this, because it's, for some reason, extremely difficult to get accurate information from people about the Rein lights and what actually goes wrong with them, or how widespread their failures actually are, and whether or not its something that can be pre-empted or fixed. For example, whether or not returning my Rein and getting the Legacy body and then using Surefire Switches or something would be better instead of using the stock Rein.

Or like, whether it's better for tactical/combat roles because you're not going to be illuminating as much of the place where you are hiding out/shooting from cover/illuminating yourself from backsplash/leaving a massive identifiable path of light that makes it extremely easy for others to see exactly where you are. Or even other practical effects of the different beam designs/lumen output, such as being able to 'blind' someone more effectively because you have that high candela beam hitting their eyes, but you are also barely illuminating the area around them, which increases the relative contrast of the light hitting their eyes vs. illuminating more of the area around them with the Rein, which would make it easier for them to still navigate their environment because the spill + lumen output is so much higher that even though they are getting blasted if they look towards you, they still have enough light from the spill illuminating the area around them)

I just really wanna make the decision that's gonna give me the most reliability and best performance as an offensive piece of kit. I want my light to be a weapon as well, and I of course want to be able to make shots out to 150-200yds at night with my LPVO. But I don't wanna chase performance just for the sake of performance if I'm giving up reliability and practicality. If the rein is too much for its own good, I'd rather stay away from that.

The only thing about the Surefire that really pisses me off though is the driver they use. It's so bad and it's barely even regulated in a way that makes sense. I'd rather have a light that tries to go as hard as possible until it dies. I don't want a mostly unregulated driver that causes the output to just slowly decrease from the moment you first use it and continues to decrease every time you use the light.

I'd rather have a regulated driver that forces the output to stay close to nominal output until it dies instead of having an artificially increased runtime, where half of the 'total runtime' is output that is basically nothing like the nominal output. Half of the Surefire's 'runtime' is 400 lumens/50,000 candela and slowly trickling down to 0. Maybe the first half of the Surefire's output IS regulated to keep it at nominal levels, and then it later switches to 'slowly dying' so that if you ARE needing to use your light in a 'long burn' situation where you don't need max light output, but you just need SOMETHING to keep running, then that would fine I guess.... but nobody actually does tests like that and I don't have a way to objectively test it to know for sure. All I know is that I only got about 30-45 minutes of total runtime before the light was significantly dimmer than the original output. I.e. A good flashlight is one that "moves the output curve as far to the left as possible", where it has an intelligent, well-regulated driver that forces the light to stay close to nominal output even if it means killing the battery much faster. I'd rather have a light that stays bright for its entire, but shorter duration, instead of a light that is only bright for a short while and then just slowly drains til death. But maybe the Surefire can keep nominal output for longer than I'm realizing, and maybe I just need to do better testing.

Do you folks that have the SureFire Turbo feel like you get enough peak performance out of it to not feel like it's a liability?

Absolutely. An E2XTL in an Arisaka 18650 body is a great setup.

Very tight hot spot with plenty of useful spill and a run time of 90min on an 18650.