Fox Racing Shox DHX RC4 Rear Shock

The Fox DHX RC4 is the third shock that I have run on my current rig. And let me start byapologizing to my bike for not buying this shock right away.

Okay, so for the experiences. As soon as I installed it, I promptly took this shock up to one of my favorite trails. The trail has some gnarly rock sections, with some nice big drops too. Perfect for tuning. I had found and copied the Fox tuning guide for the RC4, and found their instructions and suggestions perfect for helping me quickly and accurately fine tune the settings. After about an hour, I had my rear shock dialed in to perfection.

The RC4 takes all the hits I throw at it with ease, never bottoming. I've even cased a few landings on it. And as for trail chatter and rock sections, well lets just say the term for smooth needs to change from "smooth as a baby's bottom" to "smooth as a Fox DHX RC4."

Coming off some of the lesser fox offerings and previous model years, this shock is a real step up. All the adjustments are useful and straightforward and is a great match for the enthusiast who still wants a hand-full of settings to dial in the ride, yet doesn't want to shell out the cash for a super high end shock. After having ridden a CCDB, I can see that there is another level up in performance out there (compared to the RC4), however there are services that offer custom tunes for the Fox so that opens up options for future upgrades if desired.

As far as the performance goes, the reason I love coil suspension so much is that it eats up small chatter and yet doesn't blow through to the bottom on big hits. The times I've maxed out the travel haven't felt too rough - with a couple of notable exceptions The suspension seems to track rough terrain better than my DHX 5 from a few years ago, but they were different bikes too so that may be part of the difference I'm feeling.

The fact that Fox is so well represented in the mtb community means that just about any shop can help you out with questions or issues should they arise. For me, two years and no problems is a good sign... knock on wood.

It’s hard to write a thoughtful and technical review about such a complex piece of suspension when in the end all I really want to say how sweet, smooth and plush the RC4 is. Plus I don’t fully understand all the mechanical jargon and technology that goes behind making this shock work.

Most recently I’ve been running the DHX 5.0 and then switched over to the RC4 at the begging of this summer and the change was quite dramatic between the two. The first thing I noticed when I upgraded to the RC4 was how much smoother the suspension ran, this was instantly noticed when just compressing the suspension in the parking lot and also on the rough trails as well. I noticed that the shock shaft is a bit thicker on the RC4 vs the DHX 5.0, I assume this has a bit to do with the smoothness of the shock. Another thing I noticed is that this shock just feels a bit more lively, whether it is compressing or rebounding it just feels better.

Another improvement over the DHX 5.0 was the small bump compliance, my bike previously with the DHX suffered a bit from weird behaviour on the smaller/faster hits, this was greatly improved with the RC4.

In terms of adjustability it has all the standard options such as H/L compression, bottom out, rebound and preload.

So without going into the technical aspects this shock greatly improves the ride characteristics in smoothness and overall ride quality over the DHX 5.0 and I would highly recommend this product.