3balls Golf
It seems like every time you turn around there’s a new driver with a bunch of amazing features making waves in the pro shop, but it’s not every day that the buzz is about fairway woods. With the release of the X Hot and X Hot Pro fairway woods, Callaway got the golf world talking about fairway woods and has been keeping it buzzing. They deconstructed the old-fashioned fairway and rebuilt it – the X Hots are better, stronger and faster than ever before.
The standard X Hot and the X Hot Pro were released at the same time and at roughly the same price point, creating a lot of questions for golfers looking to upgrade their old fairway woods. The differences are slight, but important, which is why the question keeps coming up – which club is better?
X Hot Vs X Hot Pro Fairway
These new Callaway fairway woods look a lot like the clubs of days past, but they’re strikingly different in a number of important ways. The club faces of the 3, 4 and 5 woods are forged together with the front of the crown and sole of the clubhead to form the lauded Forged Speed Frame Cup Face, resembling older Callaway woods. This type of clubface increases forgiveness by up to 90 percent over club faces that are welded onto the club alone, like in the 7, 9 and 11 woods in the same line.
The design isn’t new – what has changed is that these heads are made from stainless steel to reduce the clubface’s thickness by 40 percent.
The other massive change is the Internal Standing Wave, an undulated weight that moves the center of gravity of the head to a lower, more forward position. The intention of these upgrades is to give all of the X Hot clubs more ball speed with less effort. The cambered Warbird sole isn’t new to Callaway clubs, either, but by adding it to these fairway woods, an already lightweight, controllable wood becomes a flexible club that can get a good bite on the ball no matter where it lies.
The differences between the X Hot and X Hot Pro are small, but where it counts, with the X Hot Pro having a slightly more forward center of gravity, more camber and an open head, giving the X Hot Pro a little more spin and a flatter trajectory when similar clubs are compared. The X Hot Pro also has a slightly smaller head, making shots more difficult for fast swings. Besides the different colored and marked heads, you’ll also notice that the X Hot clubs are longer and have a greater lie angle than the X Hot Pros when loft angles are compared side-by-side. Ultimately, the X Hot Pros may give you slightly better control and more distance if you tend to hit your balls square, but high.
